I have become a huge Yorgos Lanthimos fan in a relatively short period of time, which is a slightly annoying thing to admit because it now makes me sound like one of those people who suddenly “discover” a director after the rest of the world has already spent years writing essays about him in coffee shops with exposed brick walls.

But here we are.

The strange thing is that my first encounter with Lanthimos was not recent at all. I watched The Lobster around a decade ago and gave it a 10/10 at the time. I remember being fascinated by how cold, absurd, cruel and somehow emotionally devastating it was. A film that looked like a deadpan joke and then quietly stabbed you in the ribs. Exactly the kind of cinema I tend to fall for, because apparently I have decided that entertainment should also make me question the entire architecture of human behaviour.

And yet, somehow, I did not immediately follow the thread.

For years, Lanthimos remained one of those directors I knew I had loved once but never properly pursued. Then, about a year ago, I watched The Killing of a Sacred Deer and gave it a 9/10. That was the moment when something clicked. I realised that this was not just a director I had liked once. This was one of mine.

From there, the pattern became impossible to ignore. In a very short period of time I watched The Favourite and Bugonia, his latest international hit and another reminder that Lanthimos has somehow smuggled deeply strange cinema into the global mainstream, both 9/10. Then I realised that, almost without consciously building the connection, I had also watched Poor Things some months earlier, which I rated 8/10, and Kinds of Kindness, which I gave 7/10.

The trend was clear.

Yorgos Lanthimos had entered that small personal club of fetish directors for me, alongside people like Lars von Trier, Tarantino, Zemeckis and Nolan. Not because they all make similar films, obviously, but because they all have a recognisable universe. You know when you are inside one of their films. The rules are different there. The air tastes strange. The characters behave like humans who have been assembled by someone who has read the manual but deeply mistrusts the product.

Still, there was one Lanthimos film I had kept postponing: Dogtooth (Κυνόδοντας), his 2009 Greek-language breakthrough.

Not because I was not interested. Quite the opposite. I knew this was the film that had first brought him major international recognition, winning at Cannes and later earning an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. But I also knew this was not a film to put on casually after dinner while half-scrolling through the phone like a defeated citizen of late capitalism waiting for sleep to arrive.

Dogtooth has not, as far as I could find, been widely available dubbed from the original Greek. Personally, I almost always prefer to watch films in the original language with subtitles. But let us be honest: that kind of viewing requires a certain mental state. You need to put distractions away. You need to commit. You need to actually watch the film, not merely allow moving images to happen in front of your tired face while WhatsApp, football Twitter and the general collapse of civilisation compete for your attention.

This weekend, I finally found the right moment.

And yes, Dogtooth fully met expectations.

A house, a fence, a language, a lie

I will not ruin the plot, because Dogtooth is the kind of film whose power depends partly on discovering just how far its world is prepared to go. But the basic premise is simple enough.

A father and mother live with their three adult children in an isolated family home somewhere outside Athens. The children have never left the property. Their entire knowledge of the world has been manufactured by their parents. The outside does exist, but only as myth, danger and prohibition. The fence marks not just the boundary of the house, but the boundary of reality itself.

Inside this domestic prison, words do not mean what they mean outside. The parents teach their children deliberately false definitions. Everyday objects and concepts are renamed. Language is not a tool for understanding the world, but a weapon used to prevent understanding it. The result is absurd, funny in a sick way, and deeply disturbing.

This is one of the most brilliant aspects of the film. Lanthimos understands something that every authoritarian system understands perfectly: if you control language, you control thought. If you control thought, you control the limits of what can be imagined. And if people cannot imagine an outside, they will struggle to rebel against the inside.

The parents do not simply imprison their children physically. They colonise their consciousness.

And this is where Dogtooth becomes much more than a strange film about a deranged family. The family here is not just a family. It is a miniature state. A private dictatorship. A tiny fascist regime with a swimming pool.

The family as ideology factory

There is a lazy liberal way to read Dogtooth as a story about “bad parenting”, as if the problem here were merely that these particular parents are a bit too controlling. But that feels far too small. This is not just a film about family dysfunction. It is a film about how ideology is produced, enforced and naturalised.

The home in Dogtooth is not a refuge from society. It is society in concentrated form.

The father controls access to the outside world. The mother helps reproduce the system. The children are trained through language, fear, rewards, punishments and ritual. Their ignorance is not accidental. It is manufactured. Their dependency is not natural. It is produced. Their obedience is not proof of consent. It is the result of an environment designed to make dissent almost unthinkable.

That is what makes the film so politically rich.

We are not born free-thinking individuals who then simply choose our beliefs in some neutral marketplace of ideas, no matter how much liberal mythology insists on pretending otherwise. We are shaped. We are trained. We are given words before we know what words are. We inherit categories, taboos, fears, hierarchies, national myths, religious rules, gender expectations, class instincts and family loyalties long before we are capable of examining them critically.

And then society has the nerve to call the result “common sense”.

Lanthimos takes this process and strips it down to its most brutal form. He makes ideology visible by making it grotesque.

Fear as border control

One of the most disturbing elements in Dogtooth is the way fear is used to maintain power. The children are not merely told that they cannot leave. They are taught that the outside is terrifying, lethal, absurdly dangerous. Even animals become monsters. The garden fence becomes a geopolitical border, a prison wall, a mental checkpoint.

This is not fantasy. This is how power works everywhere.

Every authoritarian structure needs an outside enemy. The fatherland is always under threat. The family must be protected. The nation must be defended. The children must be shielded. The culture must be preserved. The border must be secured. The leader knows best. The world beyond the fence is full of danger, degeneracy, foreigners, traitors, cats, communists, migrants, feminists, secularists, homosexuals, intellectuals, artists, whatever useful demon happens to be in circulation that week.

Fear is not just an emotion. It is infrastructure.

In Dogtooth, the parents build a whole world on fear. They do not need constant violence because the children have internalised the rules. That is the real dream of every authoritarian order: not to beat people every day, but to make them police themselves.

A perfect dictatorship does not need soldiers at every corner. It needs subjects who believe the fence is there for their own good.

The obscene innocence of ignorance

The film is also deeply uncomfortable in its treatment of sexuality, taboo and childhood. The children are adults, but they have been kept in a state of artificial immaturity. They have bodies that desire, react and imitate, but they do not have the social knowledge to understand what those bodies mean within a wider human world.

This is where Dogtooth becomes especially disturbing. Not because Lanthimos is trying to shock us cheaply, although he is absolutely willing to make us squirm. The discomfort comes from something sharper: the film shows what happens when human beings are denied the tools needed to interpret their own experience.

Ignorance is not innocence. Ignorance is vulnerability.

The children do not know what is taboo because taboo itself is a social construction they have never been allowed to encounter properly. They do not know what is normal, not because “normality” is some eternal truth floating above history, but because every society creates its own rules around bodies, kinship, sexuality, authority and shame. Some cultures forbid what others permit. Some impose marriage within religion, caste, class or tribe. Some tolerate cousin marriage. Others are horrified by it. Some obsess over female purity. Others obsess over bloodlines, inheritance or property. Always, behind the moral language, material structures are waiting: family, property, patriarchy, reproduction, control.

Lanthimos is not inviting us to celebrate transgression for its own sake. He is doing something more uncomfortable. He is asking us to recognise how much of what we call morality is taught, enforced and naturalised by authority before we ever get the chance to think.

And yes, that includes the family.

Especially the family.

Because the family is where society first enters the body.

Rebellion always finds a crack

What makes Dogtooth more than a bleak exercise in controlled cruelty is that the system is not perfect. No system ever is. Power always dreams of total control, and power is always lying to itself.

The outside world seeps in.

Objects arrive. Words mutate. Desire wanders off-script. Images contaminate the closed circuit. Curiosity survives. The children may have been trained, but they are not machines. They observe, copy, misinterpret, compete, desire and eventually begin to sense that reality might be larger than the story they have been given.

This is the most hopeful and most dangerous idea in the film.

Human beings can be shaped, yes. Crushed, yes. Indoctrinated, yes. But never completely sealed. There is always a leak somewhere. A gesture. A song. A videotape. A word. A body that wants something it has not been authorised to want.

Rebellion does not begin as a fully formed political programme. Sometimes it begins as confusion. Sometimes as imitation. Sometimes as a childish mistake. Sometimes as the unbearable suspicion that the world might be bigger than the prison.

That is why every authoritarian system fears art, language, sexuality, travel, education and memory. Not because any one of them automatically liberates anyone, sadly humans remain very capable of watching great films and still becoming idiots, but because each one can open a crack in the wall.

And once there is a crack, the outside exists.

Lanthimos before Lanthimos became “Lanthimos”

Watching Dogtooth after seeing his later work is fascinating because so much of Lanthimos is already here. The deadpan performances. The emotional flatness. The ritualised cruelty. The absurd rules treated as completely normal. The comedy that makes you laugh and then immediately feel morally implicated for laughing. The sense that human beings are not rational creatures but social animals trained by systems they barely understand.

You can see the seeds of The Lobster, where romance becomes a bureaucratic survival mechanism. You can see the cold violence of The Killing of a Sacred Deer. You can see the power games of The Favourite. You can even see, in a distant and distorted way, the curiosity and bodily awakening that later explodes in Poor Things.

But Dogtooth is harsher, smaller, more primitive. And I mean that as praise.

There is no grand production design here, no international cast, no ornate period setting, no glossy prestige coating. Just a house, a family and a system of lies. It feels clinical, almost bare. Lanthimos does not tell us what to think. He simply places us inside the mechanism and lets us hear it grind.

That restraint is what makes the film so powerful. It never overexplains itself. It trusts the viewer enough to feel the horror without being spoon-fed a moral lesson, which is refreshing in an age when half of cinema seems terrified that audiences might have to interpret something for themselves.

Final thoughts

Dogtooth is not an easy watch, and it is definitely not a film I would recommend to someone looking for a relaxing Sunday evening. This is not comfort cinema. This is not “put something nice on”. This is cinema as a controlled infection.

But it is brilliant.

It is one of the most original films I have seen in a long time, and one of the clearest examples of what Lanthimos does best: take a social structure we are trained to see as normal, isolate it, exaggerate it slightly, and reveal the violence already inside it.

The family. Language. Education. Sexual morality. Fear of the outside. Obedience. Authority. The production of ignorance. The manufacture of common sense.

All of it is there.

And that is why Dogtooth works so well. It is not disturbing because it shows us something alien. It is disturbing because, beneath the absurdity, it shows us something horribly familiar.

The fence may be extreme. The rules may be grotesque. The vocabulary lessons may be insane.

But the method?

The method is everywhere.

9/10.