Dogtooth

Dogtooth

96 Minutes

All three children have blindfolds on. They’re each in their early twenties, and making their way through the beautiful grounds of their estate, arms outstretched in search of something. Every so often, a voice calls out to them, like they’re playing a land version of Marco Polo. They converge into a group hug in the middle of the lawn, at a little platform where their mother is standing and waiting for them. They will, all three grown children, receive stickers for their efforts, which they can put towards their monthly totals.

It’s nice to get the most points because whoever does gets to pick the night’s family entertainment when the tally’s taken. They watch home videos at the son’s (Hristos Passalis) request, footage of planes flying overhead, which the kids have been asking about lately. Tomorrow, the father (Christos Stergioglou) will wait for a plane to pass overhead, then throw a toy version of it onto the lawn, claiming it crashed. The kids will believe him. Tonight, while everyone else is asleep, the older daughter (Aggeliki Papoulia) will steal a piece of cake and hurl it over the 30 foot wall surrounding the house, hoping that her brother, who ran away or died or who-knows-what an indeterminate amount of time ago, receives some sustenance, wherever he may be in the area beyond.

Dogtooth is a fascinating family portrait, a slightly cozier alternative to the case of Josef Fritzl, the man in Austria who kept his daughter locked in the basement for 24 years and made her bear his children. The motivations behind the parents’ actions in this film don’t appear to be sadism, rather an insane degree of protectiveness, but nonetheless they’ve imprisoned their kids. We don’t rightly know what happened to the aforementioned missing brother, but the parents claim that he was killed by a cat, which has made the rest of the children deathly afraid of felines, and results in a shockingly hysterical scene in which the son protects the homestead with a pair of gardening shears.

Still, the parents’ deceptions – they also make up false definitions for “dangerous” words, like a “telephone” is a saltshaker – are starting to wear off, and while the film itself doesn’t tell a story in the strictest sense, things do happen, even monumental things by the end. Dogtooth chronicles a gradual awakening on the part of the kids, and the ways that they individually choose to react to their newfound, truthfully only partial, understandings of the world they’re in.

What I find haunting about the film is its willful inscrutability – the parents are almost totally unknowable, their biggest identifiable trait is their dedication to the system they’ve created and the fury with which they maintain it. As an audience, we don’t have any assistance in understanding what’s going on in the film, literally none. There is exposition of course, by design all films have them, but you are catching up with Dogtooth’s premise at all times until it is over, and that’s a captivating thing for a movie to do. In this sense, it’s like a great work of science fiction – speculative, but at the same time wholly rooted in believable, or rather feasible situations.

There’s no way of knowing whether or not a situation exactly like this one is playing out in the world today. Because it is wholly conceptualized, yet non-specific, it allows its audience to place upon it any number of different interpretations, and what you’re left with is a conceptually closed, thematically open-ended vision of systems of oppression and of families; of fealty, violence and hope. Thimios Bakatatakis’ sun-dappled photography is direct and unflinching, nearly uninflected but simultaneously self-consciously beautiful. The shooting style is geographic rather than humanistic – we are placed within this space and made to deal with it, and despite the fact that much of the subject matter is unpleasant or disturbing, I found myself captivated and sympathetic, invested and confused. After all that anxiety, somehow this movie exists as a small relief.

by Andrei Alupului