Toronto – Despite the audience chuckling under their coffee-breath at 10am, this movie is still quite the dysfunctional study and I don’t think anyone walked out of Varsity cinema, stared at the sun, and said to themselves: “well, that was another artsy banality that I rather not have seen”. Kudos to the director for not giving in and opening the trunk to let us see what’s inside.

Dogtooth (Kynodontas) is a glimpse into a dysfunctional family of 5 living on the outskirt an industrial city (somewhere in Greece?) The major malfunction: the parents. In trying to keep an absolute grip on their family, the kids are fed propaganda, exposed to nothing but planned encounters, or if their excursions were unplanned, they were quickly turned into educational moments to further strengthen the agenda. Oh btw, excursion in this house means a super strong plastic… just like zombie = little yellow flowers, pussy = bright light, mommy = birth place of siblings and dogs, sea = comfy leather armchair, keyboard = pussy, and cats are the most vicious animals in the world that must be eliminated on sight with the utmost caution. The movie has a laundry list of bizarre blocks of twisted lies, and the parents must do everything in their power to guard them. The kids, of course, turns out to be inept at common social norms but excel at their parents’ kingdom. They compete to see who can wake up first after smelling chloroform, practice CPR on each other, lick each other to exchange toys, have forced incestuous relationships, talk like polite robots, and have a value system rooted in prize stickers.

There’s not much to be said that can accurately transfer the sense of absurdity in this film, so I won’t even try. The acting is evenhanded without too much drama – which is to be commended because this could have easily turned out to be a Joker/madhouse affair and that would not be a life that anyone want to live, let alone grow up in. That would really have lowered the film to cliche-level; good on Lanthimos. Go and watch the film – if you saw Martyrs and found it lacking in subtlety, you will definitely find this one interesting. It is not dry in any sense of the word, it’s just that by the moment the word dogtooth is mentioned, I have the entire film by the tail and the rest was just a flushing out of details.

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