Dogtooth: the vicious family circle

It’s probably the weirdest film of the year. Dogtooth is a dysfunctional domestic drama from Greece in which three adult children live in a kind of arrested childhood in an hermetic, cloistered world that their parents have created to glue the family together. The mother teaches them alternative definitions for common words: a “telephone” means a saltcellar, an “excursion” is a durable flooring material; a “motorway” is a very strong wind. The father keeps his children safe within the walls of their home with a combination of creative corporal punishment and a rigorously instilled terror of pet cats. It’s brilliant, dark and disconcertingly funny.


The director Giorgios Lanthimos, a young-looking 36-year-old with a wispy apology of a beard, explains the idea behind the film. It is, he says, a response to the way that the traditional family model has evolved and changed, and to the idea that children are increasingly under siege from corruptive outside forces. “I thought, what would someone do if he really wanted to keep his family together for ever? Keep the family as he knows it, in a traditional way, thinking that he is doing the best. So I came up with this story of the parents raising their children away from any other influence.” It can be viewed, he adds, as a comment on the traditional Greek family. “Families stay closer, children stay with their parents until they are really old. But it could also be a universal story as well — anyone in the world can relate.”

So are there any similarities between the Athens-born Lanthimos’s own background and the creepily oppressive family environment in the film? “No, actually it’s exactly the opposite because I grew up just with my mother, she was a single mother. And she died when I was 17 years old. From then on I was by myself. So I am like an outsider observing the Greek family.” Lanthimos’s mother was a saleswoman in an electrical appliances store, his father was a professional basketball player who also taught in an exclusive school. Lanthimos’s impressive English is thanks largely to a free place at the same school at which his father taught, but otherwise his contact with his parent was “just the basic stuff. Some weekends.”

Although Dogtooth holds up a rather unflattering mirror to the Mediterranean family model — not to mention the incest, violence inflicted with household appliances and the shocking demise of a domestic cat — the film has been a resounding success in Greece. “It did really well in Greece, considering that it is Greek,” Lanthimos says wryly. “People are not really keen on Greek films, and they have good reason not to be. There have been some really bad films made for the past 30 years or more in Greece. People don’t really like to go to watch Greek films apart from the really popular comedies starring Greek TV stars.”

And as one of the most distinctive, original and genuinely unsettling pieces of cinema to emerge over the past year, Dogtooth has also made its mark on the international circuit. The film won the Un Certain Regard Award in Cannes last year, then went on to scoop another six prizes at other festivals. Coming as it did within 18 months of the Josef Fritzl affair and the discovery of Jaycee Lee Dugard, kidnapped at the age of 11 and found 18 years later, the picture has accrued a skin-crawlingly sinister resonance that Lanthimos could never have anticipated.

Nor could he have predicted the disparate interpretations placed on Dogtooth in each new country where it has been shown. In Canada and the US, for example, audiences assumed that the film was an attack on home schooling. Elsewhere, audiences have assumed that it is a political allegory and that the draconian actions of the father represent those of an overprotective nanny state that is quick to employ violence as a solution. The combination of pitch-black humour and the undeniable shock value has ensured that Dogtooth has been one of the most talked-about films on the festival circuit.

All the more galling, then, that Lanthimos had to struggle to make the film on a minuscule budget that he subsidised from his own pocket (his paying job is as a director of television commercials). “In Greece in one way it’s easy to make a film like this because you are very free to do what you want, but the reason you are free is because you don’t get any money to start with. You get a little money from the Greek Film Centre and then you have to do with it what you can. We really had to beg for many favours. It doesn’t look cheap but it was a very cheap film, because we got people to work free.” Will he make back the money he put into the film? He shrugs. “Maybe ... There’s something wrong with me. I never got into that stuff, I just wanted to make the film.”

It’s an urge to make work that Lanthimos says he shares with many other creatives in Greece — and it’s a trait that, he hopes, will protect the arts even as the Greek financial crisis darkens daily.

Meanwhile, as well as developing another project with the writer of Dogtooth, Efthymis Filippou, Lanthimos is looking to make films elsewhere in Europe — he has some preliminary meetings planned here in Britain with a view to doing an English-language picture. He’s also hoping for a slightly larger budget to work with next time. “People were happy to work free — but I’m not sure how many times they’ll be happy to do it.”

Dogtooth is released on April 23