Dogtooth (2009)

Having read a number of reviews of Dogtooth (dir.: Giorgos Lanthimos), I was so curious that I bought the dvd version. It is a strange little film, a neighbor of gloomy pieces such as Haneke's The Seventh Continent or Lucile Hadzihalilovic' Innocence. Three children are imprisoned by their parents in a lavish house. They have never been outside, and the parents feed them strange ideas and fantasies. Even language is manipulated in the parents' home-brewed tutoring. Once in a while, a woman arrives in the house to service the eldest son sexually and at first she obligingly goes along with it. Of course, there is tension in this isolated and perverted universe. I am not sure whether Dogtooth is to be read as an allegory or as a more literal, Fritzl-like story. Of course, one of the many things that make this film uncomfortable to watch is the child-like prisoners - infantilized by their parents, captivated in an eternal, nightmarish childhood. In this film, even playfulness take on a hellish dimension, as the activity we see is as far as one can get from the free activity we tend to associate with play. On a more negative note, Dogtooth has the same kinds of problems that some Haneke movies are, in my view, riddled with. I have a hard time articulating what this is: maybe something to the effect of a suffocating perspective, from which all we can see is human misery, portrayed in a clinical way. Perhaps I even hava a difficult time figuring out how this movie was labeled 'black comedy' - or wait, there were in fact some scenes that made this intelligible (as the mother telling the children that she was about to give birth to twins - and a dog). In far too many scenes, I felt that the only point was to make me squint. Another way to make this point is that I, at least during a couple of scenes, seriously had to ask myself what the point of the film was, and that I could not really provide an answer for this. Is it a film about parenting and paranoic fear of 'the outside world' and all the harm it can do to a kid? Is it a political film? A film about brainwashing and reality? Or an extreme form of obedience/servility? Probably all of this at the same time. It will be hard to listen to stories about parents 'protecting' their children without thinking about this film. Don't get me wrong. I was gripped by Dogtooth; my questions concern in what way I was engaged by the miserable story. It is the kind of movie when it is hard to look and yet as hard to look away. Relevant here is also the aesthetic form of the film: superbly icy, sterile cinematography, focusing on the eerie white interiors of the home along with the domesticized greens and blues of the garden. Composition are often skewed, so that a leg or a head is missing. It is indeed an eerie film.