Dogtooth
Parents keep their three grown children imprisoned on the family estate, inventing a false language and world to seal them off from everything outside.
Cannes Film Festival, Un Certain Regard Prize, 2009
A husband and wife raise their three adult children in total isolation behind the walls of the family compound, feeding them a fabricated vocabulary and a false picture of the outside world so that the children never wish to leave. The arrival of an outsider begins to crack the arrangement.
The film works as a parable of the family as a sealed, incestuous system that controls language and reality to bind its children, and of what it costs to leave one. It gives a therapist a stark image of enmeshment and the manufacture of a private reality. It won the Un Certain Regard Prize at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival.
Director
Yorgos Lanthimos
Yorgos Lanthimos is a Greek filmmaker born in 1973, known for deadpan performances, absurd premises, and formally bold construction. His films turn a cool eye on control and autonomy, on desire, and on the strangeness of social rules that people obey without quite knowing why. Early work such as Dogtooth gave way to English-language films including The Lobster and The Favourite. Poor Things won the Golden Lion at Venice, and Emma Stone won an Academy Award for her performance.
Details
- 2009
- Greece
- Greek
- Film