Dogtooth

Stirring, violent, and more than a little bit bizarre, Dogtooth is perhaps the foremost example of the new wave of Greek cinema – ominous, provocative, and surreal… From queasy incestuous moments to the culminating escape from the compound, Yorgos Lanthimos laces his debut with the slightest hint of mordant humour. Much like that of Lars von Trier, his work inspires the sort of laughter that comes with a flinch.

Bitterly funny in its stark irony, the film nonetheless takes on added poignancy in the modern resurgence of reactionary fatherhood. It’s a domestic melodrama for the age of purity balls, a pressure cooker of enforced domicility that can only end in rupture.

Dogtooth, by some queer magic or cinematic frisson, is funny. As the siblings perform a recital for their parents, the Eldest breaks the routine with an eclectic pop culture pastiche of dance moves. Reminiscent of Flashdance, Napoleon Dynamite, and the final scene of Beau travail all at once, her dance plays like a stilted exuberance—she is bursting at the seams of her being, but with what, she couldn’t say.