Yorgos Lanthimos’s third film was his international breakthrough, winner of the Prix Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 2009 and nominated for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Following his earlier efforts, Dogtooth, an unnervingly dark comedy, was a much more confident directorial outing that established a stylistic template still observable in Lanthimos’s recent work, including The Killing of A Sacred Deer (2017), The Favourite (2018), and Poor Things (2023). In a fenced compound lives a family under the strict control of a father (Christos Stergioglou) who takes perverse pleasure in feeding the children misinformation. Now adults, the son (Christos Passalis) and daughters (Angeliki Papoulia, Mary Tsoni) have no knowledge of the world beyond the fence, any natural curiosity conditioned out of them. The slow disintegration of their strange innocence and family life begins with the introduction of sex.

Notes by Kevin Coyne.