Dogtooth
Rent/Purchase
Three teenagers are confined to an isolated country estate that could very well be on another planet. The trio spend their days listening to endless homemade tapes that teach them a whole new vocabulary. Any word that comes from beyond their family abode is instantly assigned a new meaning. Hence 'the sea' refers to a large armchair and 'zombies' are little yellow flowers. Having invented a brother whom they claim to have ostracized for his disobedience, the uber-controlling parents terrorize their offspring into submission.
What critics thought
Lanthimos's clinical, deadpan portrait of a family sealed off from reality earned strong praise for its visual precision and unsettling originality, but critics split over whether its provocation adds up to genuine meaning or is merely an elaborate exercise in discomfort. The film's refusal to explain itself was read as either austere artistic discipline or a frustrating dead end.
“superbly shot, with some deadpan, elegant compositions, and intentionally skewiff framings”
Peter Bradshaw·The Guardian
“at times seems as much an exercise in perversity as an examination of it”
A. O. Scott·The New York Times
“All of the film's purposeful weirdness is conveyed with an unaffected simplicity that recalls the dead-aim haphazard compositions of photographer William Eggleston”
Mark Olsen·Los Angeles Times
“His cinematography is like a series of family photographs of a family with something wrong with it. His dialogue sounds composed entirely of sentences memorized from tourist phrase books.”
Roger Ebert·Chicago Sun-Times
Genres
Drama
Cast & Crew
DirectorYorgos Lanthimos
StarringChristos Stergioglou, Michele Valley, Hristos Passalis, Angeliki Papoulia, Mary Tsoni
ComposerGrégoire Hetzel
Dogtooth
Three teenagers are confined to an isolated country estate that could very well be on another planet. The trio spend their days listening to endless homemade tapes that teach them a whole new vocabulary. Any word that comes from beyond their family abode is instantly assigned a new meaning. Hence 'the sea' refers to a large armchair and 'zombies' are little yellow flowers. Having invented a brother whom they claim to have ostracized for his disobedience, the uber-controlling parents terrorize their offspring into submission.
What critics thought
Lanthimos's clinical, deadpan portrait of a family sealed off from reality earned strong praise for its visual precision and unsettling originality, but critics split over whether its provocation adds up to genuine meaning or is merely an elaborate exercise in discomfort. The film's refusal to explain itself was read as either austere artistic discipline or a frustrating dead end.
“superbly shot, with some deadpan, elegant compositions, and intentionally skewiff framings”
Peter Bradshaw·The Guardian
“at times seems as much an exercise in perversity as an examination of it”
A. O. Scott·The New York Times
“All of the film's purposeful weirdness is conveyed with an unaffected simplicity that recalls the dead-aim haphazard compositions of photographer William Eggleston”
Mark Olsen·Los Angeles Times
“His cinematography is like a series of family photographs of a family with something wrong with it. His dialogue sounds composed entirely of sentences memorized from tourist phrase books.”
Roger Ebert·Chicago Sun-Times
Genres
Drama
Cast & Crew
DirectorYorgos Lanthimos
StarringChristos Stergioglou, Michele Valley, Hristos Passalis, Angeliki Papoulia, Mary Tsoni
ComposerGrégoire Hetzel
Rent/Purchase