A Take on ‘Dogtooth’
Dogtooth (2009), Dir. Yorgos Lanthimos
Dogtooth is an absurdist film to say the least, situated in an autocratic family where the children have not stepped out of the house, ever. the children are two daughters in their late teens and a son in his early 20s. the wife willingly suspends her locomotive rights to confluently ascribe to the father’s parenting regime. the children display infantile, co-dependent behavior catering to the whims of their parents
The psycho-social perception of the children is completely distorted through a number of tactics including isolation, negative motivation and faulty semiotics. The signifier-signified relationship between words and their meaning is deliberately fluxed in order to incapacitate communication which manifests itself in robotic dialogue devoid of emotionalism. the siblings are not given names to castrate their individuality. A “phone” is a salt shaker and “pussy” is a big light that seems farcical when the children use it in daily speech. “This grotesque anti-teaching is a symptom of their parents’ own shock and trauma, an alienation they have fanatically passed on to their offspring” (Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian).
The sexual repression within the family is represented in the sisters’ little intersection with sexual behaviors as shown by Christina, which ensues a bargain for erotic favors within the family. the little sexual affiliation that is usually imbibed through social interaction is represented through incestuous processions resulting from stunted sexual wakening. the father caters to the sexual needs of the boy by hiring Christina, while the girls remain repressed, causing to garner more pent up anger, also a result of no knowledge of emotional signifiers through limited vocabulary.
The hyperreal “dogtooth” is the fruit that is awaited by the siblings for a fanciful emancipation that is never supposed to occur. the eldest sister, in a fit of rage, breaks her tooth and run offs to the trunk of car to escape while the father parks the car at the factory. we are never shown whether she gets out of the car, an open-ended psychological realist end, inviting the contextualization of unending thematic signification through aberrant film language.
