Curator Watchlist
A bleak, darkly funny provocation about language, control, and family power, Dogtooth is one of the defining arthouse shocks of the 2000s. It’s deliberately alienating, but for viewers who like cinema that turns social systems into nightmare logic, it’s unforgettable.
65% (455,376)
Where to watch: Kino
2009 · 1h 38m · ★ 65% (455.4K)
Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
Starring: Christos Stergioglou, Michele Valley, Hristos Passalis
Three teenagers are confined to an isolated country estate that could very well be on another planet. The trio spend their days listening to endless homemade tapes that teach them a whole new vocabulary. Any word that comes from beyond their family abode is instantly assigned a new meaning. Hence 'the sea' refers to a large armchair and 'zombies' are little yellow flowers. Having invented a brother whom they claim to have ostracized for his disobedience, the uber-controlling parents terrorize their offspring into submission.
Yorgos Lanthimos
Greek Film Centre, Boo Productions, Horsefly Productions
Christos Stergioglou, Michele Valley, Hristos Passalis, Angeliki Papoulia, Mary Tsoni, Anna Kalaitzidou, Steve Krikris, Sissi Petropoulou, Alexander Voulgaris
Kino Film Collection
A bleak, darkly funny provocation about language, control, and family power, Dogtooth is one of the defining arthouse shocks of the 2000s. It’s deliberately alienating, but for viewers who like cinema that turns social systems into nightmare logic, it’s unforgettable.
Dogtooth is a savage, deadpan fable about what happens when language itself becomes a tool of captivity. Yorgos Lanthimos turns a sealed family compound into a miniature dictatorship, where words are reassigned, reality is edited, and obedience is enforced through fear and ritual. The result is both absurd and deeply disturbing, often in the same scene.
What makes it linger is the precision of its control. The performances are blank in a way that feels engineered, the humor lands like a trap, and the film’s logic is so self-contained that every new detail feels like another locked door. It’s less interested in plot than in the mechanics of domination and the damage done by total isolation.
This is not an easy watch, but it is a major one. If you respond to cinema that is formally austere, morally corrosive, and weirdly funny in the darkest possible way, Dogtooth delivers a singular experience that still feels bracing years later.
siobhan (3.5★) · 13083 likes
yorgos literally every time he finishes shooting a scene: haha i’m so random 😂😂😂 i can’t believe i just did that 😂😂😂
lauren (3★) · 8257 likes
what kind of anti-cat propaganda
Lise (4.5★) · 6894 likes
Dogtooth is disturbing. It creeps into your psyche and stays there for days. It plays like an absurdist comedy at first but quickly shows its true colours. It is a gripping, compelling, shocking and extremely sad story of three nameless nearly adult children who live in a world created exclusively by their parents. By "nameless" I don't mean that we are never told their names; I mean they have no names. The implications of this are enormous (take a minute… more
jeff (4.5★) · 5360 likes
you guys keep trying to convince me that this isn’t a documentary about homeschooling and i’m not gonna fall for it
ksenija (3.5★) · 4490 likes
can't stop thinking about that scene where we realise the dad has casually convinced his children that their grandfather is Frank Sinatra. and he's "translating" the lyrics to be like "we love our home, we always obey mother and father"... this movie is just bursting with ideas and its so hard to tell whether they're hilarious or terrifying.
Shares the same deadpan absurdism, controlled performances, and cruelly funny social allegory.
Austere, unnerving, and morally cold, with the same sense of ritualized dread.
Lanthimos’s sharper, more accessible blend of power games, manipulation, and dark comedy.
A severe family-and-faith drama that builds a similarly haunting sense of existential pressure.
Explores repression, punishment, and the origins of cruelty in a controlled social world.
A ruthless study of domination and viewer discomfort, with a similarly sadistic edge.
For its nightmare logic, oppressive atmosphere, and sense of reality warped into a closed system.
Emotionally extreme and psychologically destabilizing, with a similarly feral intensity.
A severe portrait of control, repression, and damaged intimacy that never lets up.
Another chilling family nightmare about nurture, violence, and emotional alienation.
A stylized, suffocating portrait of adolescence trapped inside a sealed domestic world.
Dreamlike rural unease, childhood distortion, and a sense of innocence under siege.
authoritarian control, family abuse, language and meaning, isolation, coming-of-age distortion, psychological captivity, absurdism, social conditioning
arthouse, black comedy, psychological drama, surreal, disturbing, absurdist, authoritarian, family horror, slow-burn, 2000s