Review of Dogtooth (2009) by Ryan H — 21 May 2012

Imagine living in a home that's separated from the rest of society. On top of that, your parents won't let you communicate with anyone or leave the yard. You can have free roam of everywhere inside the fence.

Most people would say "easy, I'd just run away." Giorgos Lanthimos makes a strong argument otherwise. These three teenagers haven't met anyone outside of their immediate family other than Christina, a girl who's paid to come over and have sex with the brother.

I guess the parents decided that he's the only one that needs to fulfill his sexual urges. Lanthimos subtly gives us information, like how the brother talks to the fence and the eldest sister throws cake over the fence because they've been told their brother escaped and lives on the other side of the fence.

One day the brother finds a cat and kills it. The father comes home and tears his clothes up then puts red paint on him and says he found their brother dead. The cat killed him. The kids freak out. They have no clue what to expect.

They have never seen a cat before. The parents don't let them watch television or movies. The videos they watch are just home videos. It shows during their free time they are risky and childish. They play who can hold their fingers under hot water the longest and a game of CPR.

Whenever a plane flies overhead they believe that it might fall from the sky and turn into a toy they find later. The rules of the family are hardly ever explained directly for the audience, but we pick it up the longer we spend time with them, like the stickers they are awarded (however, that disappointingly hardly ever makes its way into the film).

Lanthimos directly puts us in this family's situation that we understand them. The problem comes in when everything gets overly sexual. I like the sisters not understanding what licking is. And I understood the parents deciding to make the brother choose which sister to have sex with; they didn't want another Christina coming by and ruining the way they've kept their family in the dark.

But there's a limit to how much actually needs to be shown. I got all of this without having to see full on sex scenes. I didn't know what it added to the film. When I say full on sex scenes, I mean unsimulated sex.

You see the eldest sister giving her brother a handjob, erect penis and all. You also see a porno with a woman giving a guy a blowjob. The sex scene between the brother and sister didn't make me think about the characters in the moment, but instead wondering if the actors were actually having sex.

I'm not a prude, but at the same time I don't believe that should be what's going through my mind. I liked how movies are what makes the eldest sister aware of the outside world and makes her start exploring, but I just don't understand what the unsimulated sex scene was saying.

I also liked the dogtooth theory the parents give their kids. They can get rid of their tooth, but another won't grow back in. They will never be able to leave. It's haunting. It's also pretty darkly comedic.

I found myself laughing at times, like when the eldest sister tells Christina she will tell her mom she has been licking her "keyboard." Some great ideas, but just not executed as well as it could have been.