Dogtooth (2009)
Before Yorgos Lanthimos became an awards-season fixture with the likes of The Favourite and Poor Things, he made this, and what strikes you immediately is how fully formed his sensibility already was. The flat, deadpan strangeness, the refusal to wink at the audience, the sense that horror and absurdity occupy exactly the same register: it's all here, and it's all completely uncompromising.
The premise alone is deeply unsettling. A mother and father raise their three grown children in total isolation on a walled compound, feeding them a carefully constructed web of lies: that the outside world is lethal, that ordinary words mean entirely different things to what they actually do, all designed to keep them forever childlike, forever controllable. That's it. That's the film. And Lanthimos plays it completely straight, which makes it both more disturbing and more fascinating than any amount of conventional horror mechanics could manage.
It is, by design, a hard film to get a handle on. Everything is delivered with the same blank calm, and Lanthimos trusts you to sit in the discomfort and work out what it all means for yourself. There's plenty to work out. This is a film about patriarchy and control, about the lies people are fed and the cages, literal and psychological, that other people build around them. Every strange, abstract choice is deliberate, and the more you turn it over afterwards, the more it gives back. I was still chewing on it days later, which is not something I can say about most films.
That said, it's not an easy watch, and it's definitely not one for everybody. It's slow, deliberately so, and there are stretches where the abstraction is pushed further than most audiences will have the patience for. This is arthouse provocation at its most uncompromising, and it is in absolutely no way shy about testing you. If you go in expecting conventional storytelling or any kind of hand-holding, you'll bounce off it hard. I won't pretend otherwise.
But there is real intelligence and genuine daring behind every odd choice, and I think that's what separates Dogtooth from films that are merely difficult. It earns its weirdness. The discomfort you feel watching it is the point: these children's reality is absurd and horrifying, and by putting us inside that reality without ironic distance, Lanthimos makes us feel the wrongness of it in a way that a more conventional approach simply couldn't. It reminded me a little of watching Triangle of Sadness, another film that uses deadpan absurdism to say something pointed about power, though Dogtooth is considerably colder and stranger than that.
One of the most singular films I've ever seen. If you want your cinema strange, challenging and unlike anything else, this is essential viewing. If you want an easy night in, run a mile in the opposite direction. Three and a half stars, and one of the boldest, most distinctive debuts I've come across in a long while.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 2009 | Watched: 2026-08-25
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