Dogtooth Analysis

Europe, as a whole and from different points of view, as a political, cultural, or historical entity or even as a geographical location, was, and continues to be, now more than ever, one of the most controversial subjects throughout history that has many interpretations coming from different perspectives. Through the way one perceives that notion of Europe can be seen how he or she understands and identifies himself or herself in it. One of these interpretations is about europe’s fixed and stable meaning, its perfection in other words, that itself projects and successfully imposes through various mediums, such as education and language, family, religion, and sometimes even through arts and cinema. Another interpretation of europe, on the other

Language plays an important role in Dogtooth that can be seen as influencing and affecting the identity as well as bringing out violence. In addition to these, there are various other dimensions of the binary power relation of the home and foreign and of the heimlich/unheimlich relationship in the movie along with the referential layers which is the movie itself, its overall context in Greece and the position it has in europe in general.

Dogtooth is a political film that is Lanthimos’s reading of not only the Greek, but also of Europe’s contemporary or future societies through one of the most important foundations of society and of human values, which is family. Dogtooth is about a family of two parents and three children who live in a big house in an unspecified time and place in Greece. The parents, but mostly the father, have the control of everything that’s going on in the house, even their education. They perform a kind of home-schooling since they teach them new vocabulary through a tape recorder, which seems to be a form of brainwash since they give them a different definition of the words than the standardized one. We understand that the children, who are in their late teens but have a

In this postmodern destruction of family, and its illusory importance in society and life, through violence, incest, and the linguistic disability, the ironic and critical structure of the movie is coming forth. As Lanthimos himself said in an interview for The New York Times, “What if families were extinct? If that happened, I figured that there would definitely be the people that really wanted to keep that as they know it and really try to keep their families together forever. And I thought that probably they would go to extremes doing that because people really love their families a lot and they would be the people that would go to extremes to just maintain that.”(Murphy). In this manner, his movie is a glimpse of the oppressive dictatorship that parents would impose on their offspring in the future because of their