Rent Dogtooth (2009)

Deeply disturbing, highly idiosyncratic & absolutely gripping. An incredible & original film - Dogtooth review by TB

"The good parent necessarily fails."

To slightly cannibalise the famous quote by Freud, this statement is a warning shot about the need to let your children go, that there is only so much you can do to protect them before your want to keep them with you turns into something far more dangerous & sinister. It is this theme & many others that Yorgos Lanthimos examines in brutal & distressing detail.

The film enters the world of an unnamed family (mother, father, 2 daughters & a son,) looking at what appears to be the mundanity of their lives: they live in a beautiful big house with a swimming pool in the Greek countryside and are outwardly happy. But the slightest scratch below the surface reveals the horror beneath: the children (who are in their 20's & fully physically developed,) are brainwashed prisoners, told nothing but lies about the outside world by their parents & the house is surrounded by a fence, kept inside by the lie that they cannot leave except by car. The children spend their days playing endurance games as well as being taught "survival skills" at how to deal with the danger they face.

This film can be looked at in so many ways. There is the element of cults and mind control, as well as the extreme perversion of trying to control & suppress burgeoning youth sexuality. On this point, one of the most effective elements of this film is the extremely disturbing way sex is used, with highly explicit intimacy to really make you as the viewer uncomfortable with just how wrong the world you are looking into is. Whether it is the outside woman paid by the father to satisfy the son's sexual wants, through to the parents sat naked deciding about the next change they are going to bring into this world whilst hardcore pornography plays in the background, it is skin-crawlingly unsettling. The children also rarely wear anything more than skimpy outfits, ratcheting this tension up still further.

And alongside this is the constant threat of violence, whether it is sudden, mindless brutality towards each other or attacking what to most people is the most sweet & innocent animal you could imagine. This tension is heightened by the way the film is shot, with poor framing as well as a group of actors who have committed fully to this vision of hell.

After all I have written, for many people this movie would be an unwatchable & uncomfortable endurance test. But it was absolutely gripping. It reminded me in many ways of Isabella Eklöf's film Holiday, another highly disturbing but brilliantly made look at a beautiful paradise where there is hell just beneath the surface. You watch transfixed as a group of people slowly sink deeper into a living nightmare, both entertained & enthralled by seeing their journey.

The one thing this film wasn't for me, which it seems to have been for others, was funny. Whilst there were a couple of slight laughs, this was in no way the comedy which others have called it. Whilst I have a dark sense of humour, finding films such as American Psycho absolutely hysterical, here I was just horrified.

Lanthimos has created an original, horrible world which I entered passively & was glad to leave, having been changed irrecoverably by seeing it. Never will I look at a beautiful Greek house or a toy aeroplane the same way again...