This film was released 23rd April 2010 and is no longer screening.

A prize winner from last year’s Cannes Film Festival, this startling family drama announces Greek writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos as a hot newcomer on the international scene. That his film might feasibly be described as a hybrid of TV’s Big Brother, Samira Makhmalbaf’s The Apple and Pasolini’s Salò conveys some impression of its originality.

It follows the twisted efforts of a middle-class Greek couple to shield their college-age son and two daughters from the corrupt outside world by bringing them up in total isolation. So, no leaving their remote compound, and no media access either; instead there’s a regime of childish games and pointless rewards, controlling mythologies and bastardised language. Sounds intriguing? It is. More than that, it’s darkly amusing, creepily taboo-testing and utterly mesmerising as the factory-manager father inveigles a female security guard into servicing his son, setting in motion a sexual chain reaction that will change everyone’s lives. Dogtooth is fresh, frisky, and then some.