A FILM REVIEW
DOGTOOTH
by Malik Isasis
Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos, writer/director of Dogtooth has brought back the Greek Tragedy. Lanthimos’ film takes a disturbing look at a family’s narrative of isolation, and the troubling redrawing of family boundaries. The father whose Rube Goldberg approach to parenting has taught his three adult children that the word “pussy” in fact means, “lamp”. Can you imagine hearing Can you turn on the pussy?
Many everyday words have been switched around to mean something completely different. The matriarch of this upside down world, reinforces lessons of obedience and one-upmanship through childish games where the winner, gets a prize and some affection. The only way to receive affection from both parents is obedience and winning whatever game the parents has constructed.
The children (one boy, two girls) who chronologically are very young adults, have been emotionally stunted into perpetual prepubescent adolescents, and taught to fear the outside world. The cognitive dissonance between the undeniable adult-ness of the children and their emotional maturity is sometimes moving, but always unsettling.
The only outsider to penetrate the family’s world, is a female security guard who is blind folded on the ride to the patriarch’s home, and then shown a room where the son awaits. One suspects that this is a frequent routine as there is no dialogue between the two, they both respond to one another like a lab rat pulling levers; they strip naked and have sex without intimacy, just clinical precision . This arrangement is terminated when the father finds out that the woman has given one of his daughters illegal contraband, a Hollywood film in which, she recites lines. The father incidentally looks over the developing sexuality between his two daughters, spurred on by the security guard coxing the eldest daughter to perform oral sex.
After a violent confrontation with the security guard, the father and mother arrange for one of the daughters to fulfill the role of a sexual partner for the son. He chooses the eldest daughter via closed eyes. The sex is clinical, and into all enjoyable for the eldest daughter, who is not pleased with the new arrangement.
The title Dogtooth comes from the father saying that the children will be ready to leave the home when they develop their dogtooth. The eldest daughter who wants to help the process of her dogtooth come along takes matters into her own hands.
Dogtooth is a difficult film, it is a beautiful film, it is an allegory of familial dysfunctions. We are all subject to our family’s dysfunctions, and we all go out into the world spreading that dysfunction, especially when we begin to create our own families.
Grade: A
DOGTOOTH
by Malik Isasis
Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos, writer/director of Dogtooth has brought back the Greek Tragedy. Lanthimos’ film takes a disturbing look at a family’s narrative of isolation, and the troubling redrawing of family boundaries. The father whose Rube Goldberg approach to parenting has taught his three adult children that the word “pussy” in fact means, “lamp”. Can you imagine hearing Can you turn on the pussy?
Many everyday words have been switched around to mean something completely different. The matriarch of this upside down world, reinforces lessons of obedience and one-upmanship through childish games where the winner, gets a prize and some affection. The only way to receive affection from both parents is obedience and winning whatever game the parents has constructed.
The children (one boy, two girls) who chronologically are very young adults, have been emotionally stunted into perpetual prepubescent adolescents, and taught to fear the outside world. The cognitive dissonance between the undeniable adult-ness of the children and their emotional maturity is sometimes moving, but always unsettling.
The only outsider to penetrate the family’s world, is a female security guard who is blind folded on the ride to the patriarch’s home, and then shown a room where the son awaits. One suspects that this is a frequent routine as there is no dialogue between the two, they both respond to one another like a lab rat pulling levers; they strip naked and have sex without intimacy, just clinical precision . This arrangement is terminated when the father finds out that the woman has given one of his daughters illegal contraband, a Hollywood film in which, she recites lines. The father incidentally looks over the developing sexuality between his two daughters, spurred on by the security guard coxing the eldest daughter to perform oral sex.
After a violent confrontation with the security guard, the father and mother arrange for one of the daughters to fulfill the role of a sexual partner for the son. He chooses the eldest daughter via closed eyes. The sex is clinical, and into all enjoyable for the eldest daughter, who is not pleased with the new arrangement.
The title Dogtooth comes from the father saying that the children will be ready to leave the home when they develop their dogtooth. The eldest daughter who wants to help the process of her dogtooth come along takes matters into her own hands.
Dogtooth is a difficult film, it is a beautiful film, it is an allegory of familial dysfunctions. We are all subject to our family’s dysfunctions, and we all go out into the world spreading that dysfunction, especially when we begin to create our own families.
Grade: A
posted by Malik Isasis at
12:06 PM
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