Dogtooth

Dogtooth (2009) is the film that brought Yorgos Lanthimos international attention, and every seed of his current style is in it. A mother and father have raised their three adult children in a house outside the city, entirely cut off from the world. The children have never been outside, never spoken to anyone, and everything they know about the world comes from their parents. The cleverest idea in it is language. The parents deliberately teach words with the wrong meanings: sea means armchair, motorway is a strong wind, zombie is a small yellow flower. So even if the children become curious about something, they do not possess the word to ask about it. The prison is not the wall, it is the dictionary. The title comes from another lie: the children are told they can leave once their dogtooth falls out. Naturally, a dogtooth does not fall out. Lanthimos has cut emotion out completely. The actors speak flatly, the camera does not move, and violence arrives suddenly and without explanation. That coldness carried into everything he made afterwards. It won the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes in 2009 and was nominated for the Foreign Language Film Oscar, which is remarkable for a film like this. It runs 98 minutes. Good for: art cinema, the Greek Weird Wave, and allegory. Less good for: it contains incest, violence toward an animal, sexual content and abrupt brutality. It is genuinely disturbing and intends to be.