Dogtooth 4K 2009 Ultra HD 2160p

Story Movie

A mother, father and three children live in a house on the outskirts of town. The house is surrounded by a high fence, beyond which the children never go. They grow up, have fun, learn and play as their parents see fit, without any outside influence. They believe that the airplanes flying over them are toy airplanes and that "zombie" is the name of a yellow flower. Only Christina can enter the house from the outside world. In the company of the head of the household, she works as a security guard. She is invited in order for the son to fulfill his sexual needs with her help. The adult children know the family's main law: "you can't leave the house until your right fang falls out".

Review 4K Movie

The father of the family works as an engineer at a factory and earns a good salary. This allows him to maintain a large villa outside the city. The engineer's family, consisting of his wife and adult children (a son and two daughters), is fenced off from the outside world by a large fence and strictly adheres to established taboos. It is forbidden to leave the villa grounds, as there is danger outside. Only the father of the family, as the ideal medium, can cross the border. And only when a fang falls out (“it doesn't matter whether it's the right or left one,” the children repeat in unison) will it be possible to go out among people. It is clear that this will never happen, but the children, as if programmed, sacredly believe in the myths that have been created. Their existence in a limited space – the house and garden – is more like hell than a planned paradise. The ideal reality is maintained by willpower, beatings, and stickers as rewards for the winners. In the end, even the most daring plans are doomed to collapse if a foreign element intrudes into the system.

Yorgos Lanthimos' Dogtooth“ is constructed according to the principle of mythological drawings, where the world has its own semantic oppositions (the cat embodies the ”stranger,“ who is successfully destroyed with garden shears by the son of the strange family), a clearly defined space, altered references (zombie – ”yellow flower," salt shaker – “telephone,” armchair – “sea”), games (hide and seek, sexual games), and rituals. Moreover, the world of the family embodies order (constructive force), while the space outside it embodies chaos (destructive force). The synergistic paradigm suggests that each level of the system has certain parameters of order, which in a way limits freedom. To relieve this existential tension, culture has created celebrations as a special regulator of balance at all levels of human existence. But the celebration held in honor of the parents' wedding anniversary does not fulfill its function. The wild dancing of the eldest daughter (a clear copy of the dance from the Hollywood movie Flashdance) is rudely interrupted by her mother. This is another sign of the destruction of the system, the collapse of which began earlier with the arrival of Christina. From time to time, the father brought the girl to the house to satisfy the sexual needs of his grown son.

Gödel's well-known theorem on the inevitability of the degeneration of a closed system comes into play in the film. The older sister's escape marks the transition of the system into an unstable open state, where it will either move to another level or be destroyed. Latimos deliberately leaves the ending of the film open, which is not perceived as a pompous and hackneyed gesture of non-fiction cinema. In the same way, the director does not explain why the parents isolated their children from civilization. However, the answer is contained in the question itself: they are neither sexual perverts nor members of a mystical cult, but simply loving parents of their firstborn children. But, as they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions...

The film Dogtooth by Greek debutant Yorgos Lanthimos, winner of the second most important Cannes program in 2009, Un Certain Regard, which is heated to the limit of human emotions, can easily be suspected of continuous borrowing. The influence of Michael Haneke and François Ozon is keenly felt. Despite the obvious differences between these directors, they are equally harmonious in Lanthimos' film. For example, the director's detachment from the film's plot connects Dogtooth with Haneke's work, while the pathology of reality clenched into a ball brings to mind Ozon's famous Ratcatcher. But that's not even the point. The director has brilliantly managed to portray the complex concepts of Michel Foucault, Antoine Artaud, and other anthropological explorations on the themes of social control, family, cruelty, and culture in the language of cinema. This makes Yorgos Lanthimos a notable phenomenon in the arena of contemporary European cinema. Despite all the obscurantism and perversion of human relationships that take place, the film is woven through with the universal fairy tale of the search for freedom.