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Review: Dogtooth (Κυνόδοντας) (2009)
As is the case with most of Yorgos Lanthimos' movies, this one had a pretty strange story, but the weirdness is what kept me watching. Spoilers.
Story
The story is of a family who shelters its children to extreme levels. The children are adults but the parents still retain much control over their lives. In addition, the children do not know about very basic things that the average person would learn about in puberty, such as things about sex, swear words, etc.
The father hires a security guard at his job to sleep with his son (but he does not do the same for his daughters). Through this security guard, Christina, the older daughter learns things about the outside world, including sex and pop culture.
The parents have instilled in the children that they cannot leave the house safely unless their dogtooth falls out, and then, they can only leave in a car. They can only be in the outside world, outside of a car, if their dogtooth grows back out. The eldest daughter knocks out her own canine and hides in her dad's trunk. The father leaves the premises, but the movie ends with a closeup on the trunk. It's left ambiguous as to whether the older daughter does leave the car.
There is a lot to unpack in this story, especially because we see how differently the children act compared to the average person on the "outside." I'll talk more about these in the themes section.
Production
I was expecting this movie to be even weirder than the Killing of a Sacred Deer and the Lobster since this was an older movie. I think I was right in that regard, especially because of how this movie was filmed and edited.
It's been a while since I watched the Killing of a Sacred Deer and the Lobster, but Dogtooth definitely had more simplistic cinematography. There wasn't any fancy camerawork, and I think there was no background music.
Of course, this wouldn't be a Lanthimos movie without actors delivering lines robotically. Even though I don't speak Greek, I could tell how robotically and emotionlessly the characters delivered their lines, which made me focus on what they were saying a lot more than how they were saying it.
I admit I was kind of squicked out at the violent scenes. I couldn't watch when the older daughter was knocking her own tooth out, and the scenes when the older daughter was getting her head beaten were also hard to watch.
There was quite a bit of nudity in this film, but I think it also had to do with the kids' warped perception of sex and the naked body.
Characters
Father
The father was the patriarch of the family. He called all the shots. I wouldn't be surprised if he had made up all of the rules for the kids. He even enforced rules on his wife, such as not having her leave the house.
In some ways, the father was also sort of childish, and that was probably one of the causes for his warped parenting style. The only way he know how to handle conflict was with violence. When he went to Christina to confront her about "negatively influencing" his older daughter, he beat her, and told her that he hoped his future children would receive bad stimuli and grow up to be bad. By the way, I really think that he meant those words. But I just felt that the dad had a very black-and-white way of how he viewed the world, and he enforced that in his parenting.
Mother
The mother was a bystander in all of this. She had access to a phone, but it was really to report on what the kids were doing. Sometimes the kids would ask her about bad words, and she would make up definitions for them. But I believe that everything she was doing was on orders of her husband.
Older daughter
The older daughter came into contact with the outside world through Christina, even though Christina wasn't exactly a great person herself.
First, Christina gave the older daughter a headband in exchange for cunninglingus. The headband was supposed to glow in the dark but it didn't. The next time, Christina brought hair gel, but the older didn't want it. Instead, she took some movies from Christina's bag. Based on what happened later in the movie, I think the older daughter had watched Rocky, Jaws, and Flashdance.
While the kids did get in trouble from time to time, I felt that the older daughter seemed naughtier than the others. There was that time she fought with her brother over the toy airplane, and then cut him with a knife.
The older daughter choosing a name for herself was a pretty big moment. I had assumed that we just didn't know what the names were, but I came to realize that the children actually didn't have names. The son would refer to the older daughter as the eldest, so this was the first time that she had an identity, permission to be her own person and to make her own mistakes.
After the first time she had sex with her brother, Bruce recited lines she'd seen in a movie to show to her brother that she didn't like sex. I think if it was the younger sister, she probably wouldn't have said anything, since it was supposed to be her duty as assigned by the parents.
I wanted to be optimistic about the ending, and I want to believe that Bruce built up the courage to leave the car.
Son
The son seemed to be the favourite child. The kids regularly had competitions, and the winner would get a sticker and would get to choose their entertainment. I don't remember if we ever learned what game they were playing, but the son seemed to win an awful lot.
One thing that stuck out was the fact that the parents only cared about the son's sexual needs, so much so that they hired someone from the outside to come into their home. We later saw that Christina wasn't working out, and the parents coerced their daughters to be sexual objects for their son, regardless of their feelings.
I don't think any of the children thought this was weird, and just went along with it.
At the end of the movie, the son and the younger daughter were laying in bed together and they kissed. I was kind of wondering whether the son and the younger daughter would perpetuate the cycle of bad parenting, this time with the incest factor. I do have an inkling that the kids aren't biologically related though. More on that later.
Younger daughter
The younger daughter was less wild than the older daughter, but through them hanging out, the younger did also absorb some outside influences.
The older daughter learned from Christina that apparently licking people in places earns rewards, so she did the same to her younger sister. The older daughter didn't realize that Christina felt sexually satisfied when receiving cunninglingus, so she just told her younger sister to lick wherever. However, throughout the course of the movie, we see that the younger daughter seemed to enjoy licking. To outside viewers, it would seem that the younger daughter was exploring her sexuality without really understanding that it was sexual. She liked licking, and thought that it was just a way to get a gift.
The older daughter also discussed the concept of a name with her younger sister. To them, a name was something to get a reaction out of a person, rather than an identity, but the fact that Bruce could get a reaction out of only the older daughter was an identity in itself.
As mentioned above, it seems that the younger daughter and the son bonded after their older sister ran away.
Christina
Christina was the security guard at the father's workplace who was hired to sleep with the son. The "trigger" of things happening was when the son wouldn't perform cunninglingus on her, so she went to the older daughter instead. By creating this relationship, the older got access to more things from the outside world.
While the older daughter did probably take initiative to seek out these things, Christina herself was not the best person as well. Giving someone a gift in exchange for cunninglingus is pretty slimy, but it is representative of unfortunate instances that happen in the real world.
The parents pushed all the blame onto Christina. They stopped their financial relationship, and the father also personally went to visit Christina to beat her.
Themes
Sheltered parenting
Instances of sheltered parenting were numerous in this movie. The parents often replaced bad words or redefined them. For example, the older daughter referred to her genitals as a keyboard. In addition, the mom defined a c*nt as a lamp, and a zombie as a little yellow flower. By doing so, the parents avoided responsibility in having to explain what those things were.
The parents also "created" family stories for the kids. They'd told the kids that their brother lived over the fence. Why they did that, I have no idea. Perhaps it was something they did to try to explain away the outside world. The parents also passed off Frank Sinatra as their grandfather, and when he was singing Fly Me to the Moon in English, the father reinterpreted the lyrics as something much more simplistic than the actual lyrics.
Stages of learning
The father left his dog with a dog trainer. It's unclear what he was training the dog to be. My guess would be that the parents wanted the dog to guard the kids and to prevent them from going outside.
The dog trainer didn't want to let the dog go because it was only at stage 2, implying that training techniques change over time.
I think the father did not have the same sense of progression in terms of parenting. He probably didn't really understand why it mattered that the dog was only at stage 2. We see that he still treats his adult children as though they were 10 years old. In the real world, most parents would adapt their parenting style as their children grew up. Parents would have the sex talk, then they'd talk about college, etc. And their vocabulary would probably expand too. But the parents are definitely stuck at parenting their children as though they were toddlers and never moved on.
Warped perception of danger
The kids have a very warped perception of danger. They play with dangerous things as toys, but they are also very afraid of normal non-dangerous things.
The first scene was of the children playing a game where they'd test their endurance. Whoever could hold their finger under hot water would win, which of course is a pretty dangerous game. Later on, the sisters played a game with anaesthetic, and the one to wake up first would be the winner. Again, VERY DANGEROUS. The younger daughter at one point had a stomachache and asked the older daughter for help. I'm not sure if the younger daughter actually had a stomachache, or if they were just playing doctor, but the older daughter seemed pretty serious about her prescription.
On the opposite end, the kids are extremely scared of going outside. It's not actually described what would happen if they went outside, and I wonder if the kids even knew what would happen to them. As well, the kids were taught to be extremely afraid of a cat. Killing the cat was of course a very violent reaction to just seeing a cat in the yard. I'm not sure why the kids were so afraid. Maybe it was just because they'd never seen a cat before. But then the parents used this as an opportunity to end the kids' attachment to their "brother," and to teach them to behave like dogs (maybe so that they'd get used to having a dog when the father brought it back home).
Sexual education
The kids had almost zero sexual education. I'm not totally sure how the son came to learn about having sex. Maybe Christina was tasked with doing that.
Anyway, when it came to sex, we saw that there were differences in how the parents treated their children. I went on a few Reddit threads, and most agreed that the parents had a primitive view that men had an "innate urge" to have sex, but women could do without. We saw that this was not true, seeing as how Christina went to the older daughter for a sexual favour after the son wouldn't do what she wanted.
Raising a pet vs. raising a human
It just occurred to me that maybe the parents didn't think they were raising humans. There was a fun thread on Reddit where OP wondered if everyone except for the father was actually a dog. I don't think that's the case, but it got me thinking about how the dad's parenting style. Of course, he's very controlling. I've never owned a dog, but I'd also think that behaviour when taking care of a dog changes much less when compared to parenting a child throughout its life stages.
That being said, it's interesting that the dog trainer seems to put more thought into parenting its dogs than the father does for his children, despite the fact that the dogs live in kennels and the children live in a big house. The dog trainers believed that dogs can be trained to be different types of dogs with different personalities, but the parents did not really think of their children as different beings other than male or female.
"Pregnancy"
One day after having sex and watching porn, the mother decided that she would be pregnant with twins, a boy and a girl. Later, it was announced to the kids that the mother would give birth to a boy, a girl, and a dog.
This led me to suspect that maybe the father just kidnapped kids to raise. Otherwise, how could the mother decide the gender of her kids? This would also make the siblings' relationship slightly less incestuous, but they were raised as siblings so it's really only slightly less messed up.
Incest
Growing up, the kids did not have friends other than each other. In adulthood, it is natural for many people to yearn for familial love, friendship, and romantic/sexual love. For the siblings, all of that love can only be concentrated on a few people.
The parents are kind of off limits, and I would even question whether the kids have familial love for their father. But it's clear that the kids probably project romantic/sexual love and friendship onto their siblings, the only people around them that are their own age.
I think the older daughter rejecting her brother is an act of defiance though, that maybe she doesn't need romantic/sexual love to be a complete person, whereas we see that her younger siblings do long for it, and kissed near the end of the movie.
Overall
On some Reddit threads, some people felt that the shock value of this movie was too high. I didn't feel disgusted by this movie, but I understand and acknowledge that we have some messed up shit happening in this movie.
I enjoyed this movie, but I understand that it's not for everyone for two reasons. One is because of the above. Not many people would be okay with seeing the sex/violence/incest. The second reason would be because Yargos Lanthimos' style of movies isn't for everyone. I admit that it was a bit jarring seeing my first Lanthimos movie, and it took a bit of getting used to. But after watching it, I thought the points that it brought up were interesting for discussion.
So I would recommend this for people who don't squick out easily, and who don't mind weird stories.
Story
The story is of a family who shelters its children to extreme levels. The children are adults but the parents still retain much control over their lives. In addition, the children do not know about very basic things that the average person would learn about in puberty, such as things about sex, swear words, etc.
The father hires a security guard at his job to sleep with his son (but he does not do the same for his daughters). Through this security guard, Christina, the older daughter learns things about the outside world, including sex and pop culture.
The parents have instilled in the children that they cannot leave the house safely unless their dogtooth falls out, and then, they can only leave in a car. They can only be in the outside world, outside of a car, if their dogtooth grows back out. The eldest daughter knocks out her own canine and hides in her dad's trunk. The father leaves the premises, but the movie ends with a closeup on the trunk. It's left ambiguous as to whether the older daughter does leave the car.
There is a lot to unpack in this story, especially because we see how differently the children act compared to the average person on the "outside." I'll talk more about these in the themes section.
Production
I was expecting this movie to be even weirder than the Killing of a Sacred Deer and the Lobster since this was an older movie. I think I was right in that regard, especially because of how this movie was filmed and edited.
It's been a while since I watched the Killing of a Sacred Deer and the Lobster, but Dogtooth definitely had more simplistic cinematography. There wasn't any fancy camerawork, and I think there was no background music.
Of course, this wouldn't be a Lanthimos movie without actors delivering lines robotically. Even though I don't speak Greek, I could tell how robotically and emotionlessly the characters delivered their lines, which made me focus on what they were saying a lot more than how they were saying it.
I admit I was kind of squicked out at the violent scenes. I couldn't watch when the older daughter was knocking her own tooth out, and the scenes when the older daughter was getting her head beaten were also hard to watch.
There was quite a bit of nudity in this film, but I think it also had to do with the kids' warped perception of sex and the naked body.
Characters
Father
The father was the patriarch of the family. He called all the shots. I wouldn't be surprised if he had made up all of the rules for the kids. He even enforced rules on his wife, such as not having her leave the house.
In some ways, the father was also sort of childish, and that was probably one of the causes for his warped parenting style. The only way he know how to handle conflict was with violence. When he went to Christina to confront her about "negatively influencing" his older daughter, he beat her, and told her that he hoped his future children would receive bad stimuli and grow up to be bad. By the way, I really think that he meant those words. But I just felt that the dad had a very black-and-white way of how he viewed the world, and he enforced that in his parenting.
Mother
The mother was a bystander in all of this. She had access to a phone, but it was really to report on what the kids were doing. Sometimes the kids would ask her about bad words, and she would make up definitions for them. But I believe that everything she was doing was on orders of her husband.
Older daughter
The older daughter came into contact with the outside world through Christina, even though Christina wasn't exactly a great person herself.
First, Christina gave the older daughter a headband in exchange for cunninglingus. The headband was supposed to glow in the dark but it didn't. The next time, Christina brought hair gel, but the older didn't want it. Instead, she took some movies from Christina's bag. Based on what happened later in the movie, I think the older daughter had watched Rocky, Jaws, and Flashdance.
While the kids did get in trouble from time to time, I felt that the older daughter seemed naughtier than the others. There was that time she fought with her brother over the toy airplane, and then cut him with a knife.
The older daughter choosing a name for herself was a pretty big moment. I had assumed that we just didn't know what the names were, but I came to realize that the children actually didn't have names. The son would refer to the older daughter as the eldest, so this was the first time that she had an identity, permission to be her own person and to make her own mistakes.
After the first time she had sex with her brother, Bruce recited lines she'd seen in a movie to show to her brother that she didn't like sex. I think if it was the younger sister, she probably wouldn't have said anything, since it was supposed to be her duty as assigned by the parents.
I wanted to be optimistic about the ending, and I want to believe that Bruce built up the courage to leave the car.
Son
The son seemed to be the favourite child. The kids regularly had competitions, and the winner would get a sticker and would get to choose their entertainment. I don't remember if we ever learned what game they were playing, but the son seemed to win an awful lot.
One thing that stuck out was the fact that the parents only cared about the son's sexual needs, so much so that they hired someone from the outside to come into their home. We later saw that Christina wasn't working out, and the parents coerced their daughters to be sexual objects for their son, regardless of their feelings.
I don't think any of the children thought this was weird, and just went along with it.
At the end of the movie, the son and the younger daughter were laying in bed together and they kissed. I was kind of wondering whether the son and the younger daughter would perpetuate the cycle of bad parenting, this time with the incest factor. I do have an inkling that the kids aren't biologically related though. More on that later.
Younger daughter
The younger daughter was less wild than the older daughter, but through them hanging out, the younger did also absorb some outside influences.
The older daughter learned from Christina that apparently licking people in places earns rewards, so she did the same to her younger sister. The older daughter didn't realize that Christina felt sexually satisfied when receiving cunninglingus, so she just told her younger sister to lick wherever. However, throughout the course of the movie, we see that the younger daughter seemed to enjoy licking. To outside viewers, it would seem that the younger daughter was exploring her sexuality without really understanding that it was sexual. She liked licking, and thought that it was just a way to get a gift.
The older daughter also discussed the concept of a name with her younger sister. To them, a name was something to get a reaction out of a person, rather than an identity, but the fact that Bruce could get a reaction out of only the older daughter was an identity in itself.
As mentioned above, it seems that the younger daughter and the son bonded after their older sister ran away.
Christina
Christina was the security guard at the father's workplace who was hired to sleep with the son. The "trigger" of things happening was when the son wouldn't perform cunninglingus on her, so she went to the older daughter instead. By creating this relationship, the older got access to more things from the outside world.
While the older daughter did probably take initiative to seek out these things, Christina herself was not the best person as well. Giving someone a gift in exchange for cunninglingus is pretty slimy, but it is representative of unfortunate instances that happen in the real world.
The parents pushed all the blame onto Christina. They stopped their financial relationship, and the father also personally went to visit Christina to beat her.
Themes
Sheltered parenting
Instances of sheltered parenting were numerous in this movie. The parents often replaced bad words or redefined them. For example, the older daughter referred to her genitals as a keyboard. In addition, the mom defined a c*nt as a lamp, and a zombie as a little yellow flower. By doing so, the parents avoided responsibility in having to explain what those things were.
The parents also "created" family stories for the kids. They'd told the kids that their brother lived over the fence. Why they did that, I have no idea. Perhaps it was something they did to try to explain away the outside world. The parents also passed off Frank Sinatra as their grandfather, and when he was singing Fly Me to the Moon in English, the father reinterpreted the lyrics as something much more simplistic than the actual lyrics.
Stages of learning
The father left his dog with a dog trainer. It's unclear what he was training the dog to be. My guess would be that the parents wanted the dog to guard the kids and to prevent them from going outside.
The dog trainer didn't want to let the dog go because it was only at stage 2, implying that training techniques change over time.
I think the father did not have the same sense of progression in terms of parenting. He probably didn't really understand why it mattered that the dog was only at stage 2. We see that he still treats his adult children as though they were 10 years old. In the real world, most parents would adapt their parenting style as their children grew up. Parents would have the sex talk, then they'd talk about college, etc. And their vocabulary would probably expand too. But the parents are definitely stuck at parenting their children as though they were toddlers and never moved on.
Warped perception of danger
The kids have a very warped perception of danger. They play with dangerous things as toys, but they are also very afraid of normal non-dangerous things.
The first scene was of the children playing a game where they'd test their endurance. Whoever could hold their finger under hot water would win, which of course is a pretty dangerous game. Later on, the sisters played a game with anaesthetic, and the one to wake up first would be the winner. Again, VERY DANGEROUS. The younger daughter at one point had a stomachache and asked the older daughter for help. I'm not sure if the younger daughter actually had a stomachache, or if they were just playing doctor, but the older daughter seemed pretty serious about her prescription.
On the opposite end, the kids are extremely scared of going outside. It's not actually described what would happen if they went outside, and I wonder if the kids even knew what would happen to them. As well, the kids were taught to be extremely afraid of a cat. Killing the cat was of course a very violent reaction to just seeing a cat in the yard. I'm not sure why the kids were so afraid. Maybe it was just because they'd never seen a cat before. But then the parents used this as an opportunity to end the kids' attachment to their "brother," and to teach them to behave like dogs (maybe so that they'd get used to having a dog when the father brought it back home).
Sexual education
The kids had almost zero sexual education. I'm not totally sure how the son came to learn about having sex. Maybe Christina was tasked with doing that.
Anyway, when it came to sex, we saw that there were differences in how the parents treated their children. I went on a few Reddit threads, and most agreed that the parents had a primitive view that men had an "innate urge" to have sex, but women could do without. We saw that this was not true, seeing as how Christina went to the older daughter for a sexual favour after the son wouldn't do what she wanted.
Raising a pet vs. raising a human
It just occurred to me that maybe the parents didn't think they were raising humans. There was a fun thread on Reddit where OP wondered if everyone except for the father was actually a dog. I don't think that's the case, but it got me thinking about how the dad's parenting style. Of course, he's very controlling. I've never owned a dog, but I'd also think that behaviour when taking care of a dog changes much less when compared to parenting a child throughout its life stages.
That being said, it's interesting that the dog trainer seems to put more thought into parenting its dogs than the father does for his children, despite the fact that the dogs live in kennels and the children live in a big house. The dog trainers believed that dogs can be trained to be different types of dogs with different personalities, but the parents did not really think of their children as different beings other than male or female.
"Pregnancy"
One day after having sex and watching porn, the mother decided that she would be pregnant with twins, a boy and a girl. Later, it was announced to the kids that the mother would give birth to a boy, a girl, and a dog.
This led me to suspect that maybe the father just kidnapped kids to raise. Otherwise, how could the mother decide the gender of her kids? This would also make the siblings' relationship slightly less incestuous, but they were raised as siblings so it's really only slightly less messed up.
Incest
Growing up, the kids did not have friends other than each other. In adulthood, it is natural for many people to yearn for familial love, friendship, and romantic/sexual love. For the siblings, all of that love can only be concentrated on a few people.
The parents are kind of off limits, and I would even question whether the kids have familial love for their father. But it's clear that the kids probably project romantic/sexual love and friendship onto their siblings, the only people around them that are their own age.
I think the older daughter rejecting her brother is an act of defiance though, that maybe she doesn't need romantic/sexual love to be a complete person, whereas we see that her younger siblings do long for it, and kissed near the end of the movie.
Overall
On some Reddit threads, some people felt that the shock value of this movie was too high. I didn't feel disgusted by this movie, but I understand and acknowledge that we have some messed up shit happening in this movie.
I enjoyed this movie, but I understand that it's not for everyone for two reasons. One is because of the above. Not many people would be okay with seeing the sex/violence/incest. The second reason would be because Yargos Lanthimos' style of movies isn't for everyone. I admit that it was a bit jarring seeing my first Lanthimos movie, and it took a bit of getting used to. But after watching it, I thought the points that it brought up were interesting for discussion.
So I would recommend this for people who don't squick out easily, and who don't mind weird stories.