Dogtooth

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Movie
German title Dogtooth
Original title Cynodontas (Κυνόδοντας)
Country of production Greece
original language Greek
Publishing year 2009
length 93 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director Giorgos Lanthimos
script Giorgos Lanthimos, Efthymis Filippou
production Yorgos Tsourgiannis
camera Thimios Bakatakis
cut Yorgos Mavropsaridis
occupation

Dogtooth (original title: Greek Κυνόδοντας Kynodontas ; alternative title: Hundszahn ) is a Greek feature film by Giorgos Lanthimos from 2009. The drama is about a couple who raise their children in their house, isolated from the outside world. It gives the three young people a strange worldview.

action

A couple lives with their son and two daughters on a secluded property and isolated from the outside world. The property itself is spacious and includes a swimming pool, but is surrounded by a high fence. Parents raise their children, who have no contact with the outside world, using bizarre methods. For example, tapes are used to misrepresent the meaning of words to the boy and the two girls. The “sea” is an armchair and a “zombie” becomes a “small, yellow flower”. The children never see a missing brother who allegedly died on the other side of the high fence, but they still think of him and even throw food over the fence for him.

The children drive away the boredom with sometimes sadistic games, the teenage son receives regular visits from his father's colleague, Christina, with whom he has sex. She remains the only non-family visitor. Christina lets the older daughter satisfy her orally in exchange for a headband. It becomes clear that for all three children sex has nothing to do with feelings. The daughter later passes the headband on to her younger sister, who in return licks her shoulder.

Using a trick by their parents, the children mistake the planes that regularly fly over the house for toys. The parents pretend that the planes crash by throwing a toy airplane into the garden unobserved at the right moment. One day when the older daughter sees her brother playing with her plane, she later avenges herself by injuring his arm with a kitchen knife.

The father visits a dog training ground to pick up his own dog. However, the trainer refuses to do so because the dog has not yet reached the highest level. He warns against ending the training too early and asks: "Do we want an animal or a friend?" The father is waiting impatiently for the dog to return and expresses this to his wife. When the dog is about to arrive, the father explains to his children that the mother is pregnant and will soon give birth to “two children and a dog”. The birth of children can be prevented if the children's behavior improves.

One day when a cat appears in the family's garden, the children are horrified and panicked. The son manages to kill the animal with a hedge trimmer. The parents decide to take advantage of this event. The father then tears his clothes, smeared himself with fake blood and returns from the outside world to inform the children that the brother was killed by this dangerous creature called "cat". The father then teaches the mother and children how to scare off other cats on all fours and barking loudly.

When Christina visits the family again, she asks the older sister to please her again. The offered hair gel declined, but was interested in two films on video cassettes in Christina's pocket ( Rocky and Jaws ). Christina hesitates at first, but when the daughter blackmails her, she agrees and leaves it to her for a certain time. The older daughter watches the films in the living room late at night. The films leave a lasting impression as she later recreates scenes from them and quotes them. The father finds the films and punishes the daughter by taping a video cassette on her hand and hitting the girl with it. He then visits Christina and beats her down with her video recorder. As he leaves, he curses their future children for being “under bad influence”.

In the middle of the night, the younger sister attacks the brother's knee with a hammer. However, she explains to the incoming father that a "cat with a hammer" did this and the father accepts this story. Since Christina no longer visits her brother, the parents decide that one of the daughters should take her place. After feeling his sisters with his eyes closed, the brother decides to go with the older one. After the mother has prepared the daughter for the upcoming event, the two have sexual intercourse, whereby the daughter is visibly uncomfortable and afterwards she quotes a passage from Rocky .

On the parents' wedding day, the older sister's inner restlessness finally manifests itself in the fact that she performs the dance she has rehearsed with her sister in an almost ecstatic manner, is interrupted by the parents and then devours a dessert. Later she stands in the bathroom and knocks out a tooth with a dumbbell. The father once stated that the children were ready to leave the house if their "dogtooth" - in the sense of a canine - had failed. Smeared with blood, but smiling and with a gap in her teeth, she escapes undetected through the nocturnal garden and hides in the trunk of her father's car. He eventually discovers the blood and pieces of teeth in the sink. He leaves the property and looks for his child in the area, while the rest of the family kneel on all fours at the gate and bark like dogs. The next morning the son and the younger daughter are hugging each other and kissing while the father drives to work, not knowing that the daughter is on board. He enters the company while the daughter stays in the trunk.

criticism

Dogtooth "... is a monstrous parable and an extremely political film." ( Jan Görner :). He addresses the construction of reality: the children of the family, sealed off in a luxurious villa complex, have no external caregivers and are completely dependent on the worldview and explanations of their parents. Nevertheless, part of the external reality is breaking through in the form of the smuggled video cassettes. The urge to explore the outside cannot be stopped either: the canine tooth ( dogtooth ), which can be interpreted as puberty, the detachment from the parental home and which of course does not fail naturally, is knocked out in a violence directed against itself .

"The very carelessly staged film gives a disturbing glimpse into a dysfunctional family, while covertly dealing with the control mechanisms of fascism and dictatorships."

- Film service

background

The film premiered on May 18, 2009 at the 62nd Cannes International Film Festival. In Germany the film was only released on DVD.

Awards

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Certificate of Release for Dogtooth . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , February 2011 (PDF; test number: 126 699 V).
  2. ↑ Film review by Jan Görner on filmstarts.de
  3. ^ Dogtooth in the Lexicon of International Films Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used
  4. ↑ imdb.de: Start dates for Kynodontas
  5. ↑ Andreas Busche: Away with the Acropolis films! In: epd Film , No. 5/2012, pp. 24–26