Uncanny Realities in Lanthimos’ Kynodontas

Uncanny Realities in Lanthimos’ Kynodontas Tara BM Smith The University of Sydney Yorgos Lanthimos’ film, Kynodontas (Dogtooth) engages with the spectrum of Freud’s understanding of heimlich/unheimlich. The film is an unsettling exploration into the power of language, the family, control and reality building. The film was released in 2009, winning the Academy Best Foreign Language Film award. For Marios Psaras, Dogtooth is the film that put Greek films back on the playing field after a long time of isolation (Psaras, 63). For other critics Dogtooth was Lanthimos’ break into more mainstream media and represented a shift from films produced in Greece to those produced in London. The success of his subsequent films; Lobster (2015), Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) and The Favourite (2018) are testament to his theory that the wider world was ready for his strange films. Lanthimos was born in Pangrati, Athens, leaving behind a career of business administration to fulfil a dream of becoming a film maker. Dogtooth is a Greek film depicting the seemingly ordinary lives of a family in suburban Greece. Whilst not typically referred to as a horror film, the director is constantly using techniques to incite a feeling of horror and revulsion in the audience through the feeling of unease that he creates. The film is part of the Greek New Wave cinema, a movement often defined by films which reflect the financial crisis and the social and political problems in contemporary Greece in a rather strange, surreal way (Vellis). This chapter will first explore Dogtooth with regards to Freud’s theory on the uncanny before secondly embarking on an analysis in light of Berger and Luckmann’s understanding of reality. Thirdly, this chapter look at the subversion and manipulation of language used throughout the film as well as the use of the uncanniness in Lanthimos’ depiction of animals. Finally, this chapter will explore the power and control shown in the family structure in Dogtooth. The film is an unsettling film, the tone of the film is expressionless and emotionless, with camera angles inciting the audience to feel as though they are viewing a twisted version of Big Brother set in a prison. Dogtooth depicts a typical Greek family living in suburban Athens. However, it is soon realised that nothing about the family is normal. The father keeps his three adult children imprisoned in the home he creates, forging a new twisted reality. No one in the film is named within Dogtooth except the outsider, Christine foreshadowing the power of names and words used throughout the film. The post-adolescents, two girls (played by Aggeliki Papoulia and Mary Tsoni) and one boy (Hristos Passalis) live imprisoned by their violent father (Christos Stergioglou) and their meek mother (Michele Valley). Whilst in film reviews Dogtooth is referred to as dark humour, it can only be the kind of dark humour that is akin to nervous laughter or unease, and even the characters within the film rarely laugh or smile. Reinforcing the feeling of reality television is the lack of any incidental music and the deadpan, emotionless actors contrasting with the unusual, Dada-like content of the film (Fisher, 23). The influence of the surrealist director Luis Buñuel can be seen throughout the film. The Buñuelian can be seen within the general blurring of realities, the random spurts of violence and the focus on the pathos of human nature (Russell). Buñuel’s films are known for their absurdity, comic elements and general strangeness. At the beginning of his film “El Angel Exterminador” Buñuel would begin the film by telling the audience that he purposefully avoided having any symbols in his film and that the film lacks any sort of explanation (Ripley, 679). This tongue-in-cheek warning Buñuel gives to his would-be-critics, is typical of the ways in which surrealist films shift out of our usual parameters of what we expect to see in film. This effect of strangeness created in Buñuel’s work, like in Dogtooth, has created a sense of uncanniness in the audience, for this very nonsensical aspect (Ripley, 680). Whilst this chapter has not delved too far into the general nonsensical elements of Dogtooth, the examples are self-evident and this general randomness certainly adds to the uncanny atmosphere that broods over the film. To reduce the film to a final didactic meaning is an impossible task. The reality the father constructs for his children is as dull and colourless as the life he leads in the factory in which he works. The only conclusion of the film that offers the audience any sort of relief is he violent ending in which one of the daughters removes her “dogtooth” and tries to escape the prison of her house. Ultimately, Dogtooth explores aspects of the uncanny by using familiar things like family, animals and language in distorted ways to create a very unheimlich experience. The Uncanny The unsettling effect of Dogtooth is understandable in the light of Sigmund Freud’s essay on the Uncanny. Freud defines uncanny as a quality of the terrifying that leads back to something we once knew and which was very familiar (Freud, 1). The German word Heimlich can be defined as something belonging to the house; familiar, tame, comfortable and homely (Freud, 1). It can also mean, however, something which is concealed and withheld from others, for example to do something heimlich can mean to do it behind another’s’ backs (Freud, 1). Unheimlich is defined as uneasy, eerie and “ghostly” (Freud, 1). Heimlich/unheimlich exist on a spectrum, especially seen with the duality of meaning for heimlich, the second, hidden definition almost blending into its antithetic unheimlich; thus, that which is familiar but also spooky is the very definition of Freud’s uncanny. In Freud's essay he tries through analogies and stories to put substance on an elusive definition of what exactly it is. The term for Freud is contradictory, without real definition but still containing something real, and hence tries to find the real essence of the word (Cixious, 528). In this sense, the term is more elastic, defined in its connotation rather than existing as a complete entity (Cixious, 528). It is important to also remember, as Ernst Jentsch reminds us on the discussion of the uncanny, that it does not always produce the same effect on everyone (Jentsch, 8). Thus, this paper employs this sense in a number of ways to understand the disturbing feelings created in Lanthimos’ Dogtooth. Freud explores this notion of uncanny as existing when our understanding of reality becomes blurred and disorientated: the power of Dogtooth is in the misconstruction of the children’s reality (Freud, 15). The film is shot entirely within the suffocating presence of the house. This unsettling atmosphere of seclusion is reminiscent of Ander Wyeth’s painting Christina’s World in that whilst it appears to be a peaceful scene it is hiding a horrible reality (Hoejj). The house in the film initially seems picturesque and beautiful, consisting of many rooms, a lush lawn, a high fence skirted by poplar trees, and a large pool. As the film continues, however, the house becomes increasingly claustrophobic and the fence becomes imprisoning with the trees towering over the house, offering no glimpse to the outside world except for the blue, cloudless sky. Constructed Realities In Dogtooth, the false reality is constantly being reaffirmed by the father through storytelling, language, and fear and punishment. By drawing on Berger and Luckmann’s understanding of reality as a social construct, the subjectivity of each individual’s reality can be further emphasised. Berger and Luckmann describe language and socialisation as the two defining features humans use to understand their own reality (Berger & Luckmann, 80). Reality is enforced through the programming of children and adults to behave, and institutions consistently maintain order and dissuade people to “re-define” reality outside of their institute (Berger and Luckmann, 80). In Dogtooth, the reality is established by the father by redefining language in order to erase any understanding of the outside world. Secondly, by isolating the children, they are unable to participate within the feedback loop described by Berger and Luckmann as being so important in understanding of reality. The negative repercussions of the father’s education can be seen in the children’s inability to have any emotional intelligence or empathy for their siblings or in understanding the implications of their sexual acts. The young adults, while physically mature, have been unable to grow up and seem to depict an infantile state (Fisher, 22). The children play competitive games, like sticking their fingers under boiling tap water to see who would be most resilient to the pain, and much of their play appears to be directed to trying desperately to please their father. The father has a sticker system, in which each week the children receive stickers depending on how well they behave and perform in his challenges. The prize is to choose the entertainment, which turns out to be home videos of the family. The children sit on the couch, mouthing the words to their obviously oft watched videos. In one scene, the youngest daughter listens to the father’s education tape as she cuts the toes off her Barbie dolls, screaming as she cuts each one as if they were her own toes, forming a visceral reaction into the audience, even though we know the doll and girl are separate (See Appendix Figure 1). For Freud, the effect of the uncanny is easily created by removing the separation between imagination and reality in which what is once imagined becomes a reality or a symbol and “takes over the full functions and significance of the thing it symbolizes, and so on” (Freud, 15). The power of words, symbols and a line between imagination and reality is used by Lanthimos to distort both the characters as well as the audience of what we perceive as real and tangible, like language, in a way which makes it unsettling. Negative Reinforcements Punishments in the film are cruel and bizarre. They include making the son hold mouth wash in his mouth after he threw rocks at his “brother”, an imaginary being that lives over the high fence in the garden. This dissociation of pain throughout the film adds to the strange feeling of distorted emotions and maturity within the adult children. They have an unguarded attitude towards sexual acts, the eldest happily exchanging oral sex for a glittery headband. The success of Dogtooth is not just the way it explores family relationships and power struggles between parents and children, but the way he untangles them (Psaras, 65). Psaras, in his chapter on Dogtooth, sees in the depiction of sex a transgressive rhetoric, displaying prostitution, marital loveless sex and even incest in a rather cold, matter of face and lifeless way (Psaras, 67). This transgression is done by examining the way that sex is a mechanism of control, no longer special or mystical - when allowed and sanctified in the family setting, certain things no longer become taboo. For the reader, this is incredibly unsettling because again we have things which are morally wrong now being shown to be completely normal, in a way a new form of the uncanny paradigm. It is this discrepancy between body maturity to mental maturity that contributes to the general feeling of unease within the film (Fisher, 22). The father constructs the reality for the children by keeping them in an almost infantile state, only allowing them to leave the house when they lose their dogtooth (unsurprisingly, their upper canine teeth), which drives the eldest to eventually knock her own tooth out before she runs away. The other myth that the father creates which contributes to the control of the children’s reality is the “eldest brother”, who may have once existed but is now purported by the father to live just on the outside of the fence as a constant reminder of those who would try to leave the “safety” of home before they are ready. The children engage with the fence, thinking their brother lives just behind it, by either hurling insults or food (See Appendix Figure 3). The reality for the children is established through the aeroplanes which fly over the house; occasionally the mother or father throw a toy one out of a window as the plane passes over, to make it appear as if it “fell” (See Appendix Figure 7). Isolation of the children is increased as the father removes labels from all packaged food he brings in. The barrier of the outside is reinforced every time the father exits the property; always driving, he never walks and reinforces the permeability of the “boundary” (See Appendix Figure 4). This is exacerbated when the son loses his plane outside of the fence, and his father drives a metre down the driveway to pick it up so as to reinforce the self-inflicted barrier between outside/inside, and the rules by which he forces his children to abide. The mentioned scenes are used by the father to maintain a level of control. Almost a god-like figure, protecting Eden, he keeps and protects the border, can make planes fall from the sky, can visit their long lost brother outside the wall and can produce diabolic and cruel punishments for then they no longer obey. Unheimlich Animals One of Freud’s definition of heimlich refers to animals which are tame and domestic, opposite to wild animals (Freud, 3). They are associated with warmth, homeliness, and arouse a sense of security as one within the four walls of his house (Freud, 3). What is so uncanny within Dogtooth is the re-framing of two very domestic and homely animals, the dog and cat. Whilst the children are “transformed” into dogs, the cat becomes demonised, transformed into an enemy of man. In the beginning of the film, the father visits a dog training facility to check the progress of the training of his dog, Rex. He is told by the trainer that his dog isn’t ready and informs the father, that “dogs are like clay” and need to be moulded. He states that the owner needs to show dogs how to behave and asks the father if he wants an animal or a friend. This theme of obedience and training is clearly adopted by the father who, later in the film, makes his children and wife get on their hands and knees and bark to scare away the cat (See Appendix Figure 6). The children are not autonomous adults but animals, needing to be taught how to behave. By zoomorphisising the children in this way, the father de-humanises them. Whilst the children are given animal qualities, the cat in contrast is given the role as the root of all evil, capable of killing people and eating children in their beds. When one enters into the backyard, the brother nervously hunts it down with a pair of gardening shears, one of the more horrifically gruesome scenes of the film (See Appendix Figure 5). After the cat is dead, the father decides he needs to reinforce the idea that the cat is bad and the outside world a dangerous place. He decides to cut his clothes to ribbons and smear blood all over his clothes and tell the children that he and the “elder brother” was attacked by the cat. The father states that, “Your brother is dead. A creature like the one in the garden tore him apart. On the one hand, he made a huge mistake venturing out ill-prepared … The animal that threatens us is a cat. The most dangerous animal there is. It eats meat, children's flesh in particular … If you stay inside, you are protected” He tells them to bark, like those dogs at the training facility. The family are on their hands and knees barking, as the father barks back. By fabricating the “death” of the eldest son, the father re-establishes the fears of the outside world and re-emphasises the safety of the inside from the wild beast that is the domestic cat. At another point in the film, the youngest daughter sneaks into her brother’s room and hits his leg with a hammer, stating that it was the cat that did it, clearly a ramification from the myth making done by the father, which he is then forced to corroborate and punish the son rather than the daughter. Distorted Language Language, Berger and Luckmann explain, is used in everyday life to provide people with the necessary objectifications they need to create meaning for their world (Berger & Luckmann, 35). The grounding of reality for Berger is in the constant interacting and communication with others, and these relationships help place his notion of reality in a larger context (Berger and Luckmann, 37). In order to do this, a common language is needed to communicate with others and is thus essential for any understanding of reality (Berger and Luckmann, 51). The famous Sapir-Whorf hypothesis reinforces Berger and Luckmann’s theory on the importance of language in reality building. Sapir states that humans exist heavily in the particular language they are born into as the medium of expression within their society (Sapir, 69). He concludes that no two languages create the exact same social reality (Sapir, 69). Language is used throughout Dogtooth to establish a reality for the children as well as creating an uncanny effect with the audience, who does not share the same language and meaning associated with objects. Language in the film is used to re-frame outside objects which could raise questions of the established reality and thus outside words become associated with the inside. The film opens showing three attractive young adults, one boy and two girls sitting outside in the sun listening to a tape recorder giving them a lesson. The voice, who we eventually understand as the father is defining the following words: Sea, motorway, excursion and carbine. The father dictates that the sea is a leather armchair “like the one we have in the living room, for example, don’t stand on your feet, sit on the sea and have a quiet chat with me.” The audience soon learns that a motorway is a strong wind, an excursion a material used to make floors and a carbine is a beautiful white bird. In this twisted vocabulary lesson, the outside things like wind and motorway, are becoming internalised into a world which can be understood to exist within the walls of the property. In another instruction video the father states that: “The sizes of the triangle angles are 36, 77 and 67 degrees. Side A has a length of 128 cm. Side C has a length of 97 cm. Find the area of the triangle, the length of side B and the type of triangle. Good luck. The eyes of a fresh fish are not A) bleary, B) Big, C) Red. Goodluck.” This example of instructive dialogue seems simultaneously strange and amusing, whilst the vocabulary is often mixed, the maths equation adds up. Lanthimos is constantly mixing our conceptions; a motorway may be a wind and an excursion floors but the triangle still has a set area. This is just one of the many examples in which language is used within the film to construct a new reality for the young adults within (See Appendix Figure 2). The father is making the unfamiliar into something which is familiar. In a similar fashion, the director Lanthimos is using seemingly comfortable things like the house, the family, language, animals and distorting them to create a starkly strange and dark film. It is important to note that as an English speaker critiquing and exploring a Greek film, there may of course as Dionysios Kapsaskis points out, be missing features when we have an “experience of translation” (Kapsaskis, 248). Just like the children in the film who have to rely on an authority for the meaning of words, as a viewer reading the subtitles, there is a level of trust there too. There is merit in the ways in which Kapsaskis explores translation as an important device within Dogtooth, not just on the film itself but within the wrong translations the father gives his children. For Kapsaskis, Lanthimos is making a statement about the messiness of language. This effect tied in with the absurd, almost silliness of some of the word swaps, the use of seemingly domestic animals into blood thirsty killers, deadpan acting and moody classical music scores and the random acts of violence all contribute to an unsettling viewing of the unheimlich explained by Freud. Same-same but Different Strangely, it is the very fact that Lanthimos shows restraint in his construction of this make-believe world that makes it so unsettling. Whilst many of the words change meaning and the father spins tales to keep them in check, much of the language remains the same. Instead of painting a picture of distorted reality completely removed from our own, Lanthimos draws heavily on our own ideas in a fashion that makes us question the very construction of our own reality. By doing this, Lanthimos explores the fickleness of language and labels rather than simply swapping one word for another. By throwing in the familiar, he makes the film uncannier as he attempts to unpick the fabric of our own understanding of reality and language (Metzidakis, 377). One of the more silly moments that reinforces both the manipulation of language and the mind control employed by the father is when he decides to play a record for the children of their “grandfather” singing. When the record is placed on the player, however, it is revealed that the “grandfather” is Frank Sinatra singing Come Fly with Me. Nothing in the film more evokes Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four feelings of brainwashing both in the language and control than the father translating the English song into his own Greek words as the children look onwards, smiling. The father annotates in a monotone voice, almost a mantra of, “Dad loves us. Mom loves us. Do we love them? Yes, we do. I love my brothers and sisters because they love me as well … My parents are proud of me ... because I’m doing just fine. I’m doing just fine but I will always try harder”. The effect of this scene evokes the Orwellian newspeak and the social conditioning which occurs in this novel. When interpreting the film, Kapsaskis notes that it can be viewed both as a coming of age feature with the theme of almost Eden-like expulsion or a rebellion against Greece moving on with the modern (Kapsaskis, 254).The biblical allusions are strong in the film, the strong pater familias, god-like in almost every way and in complete control of his family and the forbidden fruit that enters the family, the popular films. The main motive of the father is to avoid this tainting of the outside. The father in Dogtooth uses language to indoctrinate the children into believing the house and family are safe, and to comply with his authority. The Family Lanthimos in Kynodontas distorts the heimlich of the family unit through establishing it as the core centre for power and meaning for the children trapped in their insular reality. The film analyses the position of the parents in the shaping of their children’s values and morality, showing what can happen when this teaching spirals out of control, demonstrated in the children’s psychopathic tendency towards violence and self-harm (Karalis, 273). The family home as a prison was brought into the limelight during the same year of the film’s release with the highly disturbing Joseph Fritzl case, who kept his own daughter imprisoned, raping and abusing her for 24 years (Fisher, 22). The likeness between this real-life case and film is reinforced when the mother and father casually decide to use one of their daughters to sexually satisfy their son, echoing the incestuous nature of the Fritzl case. The film reinforces the growing power and ideological authority given to the family unit in the twentieth century as well as, to a lesser extent, the trend of children staying within the family home much further into adulthood, questioning the established traditions and position of the family in contemporary society as well as the power of the Greek Orthodox Church (Fisher, 25). The powerful father ruling his household in Dogtooth, the ultimate pater familia, can be seen as a metaphor for the Church in Greece, in which 95% of the population participates (Metzidakis, 376). In two instances within the film there is a distinct attempt for the eldest daughter to escape her father’s control. One is during the evening’s entertainment, in which the son plays Spanish guitar and the girl dances in the living room. The daughter moves almost joylessly without rhythm, her face staring at the father as she dances herself in a frenzy to the point of collapse. The movements are uncanny and you feel as if she is proving a point, like a marionette dancing attached to strings. In his essay on the Uncanny, Freud refers to an example given by E. Jensch, a fellow German psychologist as a useful example of the heimlich. The example is given of the fear created when an audience is unsure if a character is a really alive or an automaton, or an inanimate object suddenly becomes animate (Freud, 5). In the dining room scene in Dogtooth, it is this very feeling that is created as the two girls in the family begin a series of dance movements that can only be described as "puppet-like". Just as for Freud, it is this uncertainty of life-likeness (like in popular films with dolls) which conjure this feeling of uncomfortableness in the viewer. In this scene, paired with the very fast Spanish guitar and frenzied seizure like movement, the audience feels uncomfortable. Freud goes on to state that this automation isn't the only way to create the feeling of uncanny but I believe it is this feature which makes Lanthimos dance scene so unnerving. Finally, the mother says “enough” as if to the absurdity of the film. Coming of Age Later that evening, the daughter commits the second act which reflects a personal desire to leave the family and social confinement as she violently and repeatedly smashes her mouth to rid herself of her dogtooth. This was the impossible and imaginary requirement of the father, which once removed the children were deemed suitable to leave home. It is through the introduction of new forms of media, the Hollywood films, given to her by Cristina the outsider that the carefully constructed reality that the father has created begins to crumble. The elder daughter, inspired by watching one of the films, asks her sister to call her Bruce. This is the first time in the film that one of the children asks for a name. Just as language has been used to construct the reality, it is also used to help the elder daughter to begin to have an identity and gives her the courage to become autonomous, removing her own dogtooth. In Freud’s essay on the Uncanny, he specifically uses the loss of an eye as a psychoanalytic experience which plagues as children (Freud, 7). Freud saw this dread as a reference to a child’s fear of castration, giving the example of Oedipus and his loss of his vision (Freud, 7). Whilst not mentioned in the essay, it is not a far stretch to see in Freud’s reference to a child’s loss of vision, an equally terrifying experience – the loss of one’s teeth. Whilst this is a natural occurrence, a level of horror is experienced when an item of ones’ body is removed, not to mention the feelings that go with this event. In a way, it is a coming of age to lose ones’ babies teeth and represents a transition between two states of being; a child to an adult. In this scene, the object of the tooth is symbolic of the eldest daughter decides to smash her “dogtooth” out of her mouth with a dumbbell, smiling with blood in the mirror. By viewing the scene through the mirror, the importance of this event for the character’s growth becomes even more obvious. Adding to the uncanniness of the scene is the way in which the camera often cuts the head out of the shot, leaving the torso before viewing the entire scene. Much of the scene is cut away, hidden, the very definition of the unheimlich. This climax of the film is equally disgusting, horrifying and gratifying in the sense that the character might finally be able to escape the suppressing reality of her father. When the tooth is out and she covered in blood, you see her smiling - one of the few moments anyone in the film smiles. After the tooth is out, she goes and hides in the boot of the car which, the father emphasises, is the only safe way to leave the property. After the father can’t find her up the road, he gets into the car and goes to work. The film ends with a close up of the boot of the car, but not letting the audience know if the eldest escapes into the real world or not. This being a typical Lanthimos cliff-hanger, where the audience is ultimately left in the dark of the fate of the protagonist; see Lobster (2015). Dogtooth uses moments of the uncanny in order to explore power and manipulation within the family, which manifests in both the father’s use of language and reality building which traps the children. Despite the popularity of the film, the film has had very little scholarly attention, due in part probably because Lanthimos as a director is so difficult to pin down. Whilst the viewer can postulate on the meanings, just like Bunuel, Lanthimos enjoys the ambiguity of meaning, refusing to let the critic come away with any true understanding. Despite this, the film is highly nerve racking, whether it’s the high use of violence of the eldest daughter bashing her teeth in with a dumbbell, or the evisceration of the cat; all these hyper-violent and often random acts occurring within the distortion of language and in the sick perversions of the father of the household. The film challenges pater familias aspect of the family law as well as the construction of reality by society which relies on socialisation and feedback in order to be established. The film demonstrates the power of language and myth making to construct realities, the father draws on his own myths in order to keep the family in a constant state of fear. At its essence, Kynodontas employs features of the uncanny to fully absorb the audience into the world of three infantile young adults struggling in the reality their father has created. The world is suppressive, controlled and confused. Towards the end, the viewer is left feeling a sense of unease and sometimes bemused, at the absurdity of the world that is created. In the final act of disobedience of the eldest daughter, we are left feeling a glimmer of hope of escape and independence in an otherwise disturbingly dark film. Works Cited Berger, Peter L. and Thomas Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1966. Cixous, Helene. "Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud's Das Unheimliche (The "uncanny")". New Literary History 7 no. 3 Thinking in the Arts, Sciences and Literature (1976): 525-548 DeFore, John. “Dogtooth”. Hollywood Reporter. 14th October 2010. Accessed at: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/dogtooth-film-review-29723, 25/05/2016. Fisher, Mark. “Dogtooth: The Family Syndrome”. Film Quarterly (2011): 22-27. French, Philip. “Dogtooth”. The Guardian. 25th April 2010. Accessed At: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2010/apr/25/dogtooth-film-review, 26/05/2016. Freud, Sigmund. (1919) the Uncanny. Accessed at: http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/freud1.pdf, 23/05/2016. Hoeij, Boyd Van. “Dogtooth (Kynodontas)”. Variety. 19th May 2009. Accessed at: http://variety.com/2009/film/markets-festivals/dogtooth-1200474781/, 25/05/2016. Kapsaskis, Dionysios. "Translation as a critical tool in film analysis: Watching Yorgos Lanthimos' Dogtooth through a translational prism. Translation studies 10 no. 3 (2017): 247-262. Karalis, Vrasidas. Greek Cinema. New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group, 2012. Jentsch, Ernst. “On the Psychology of the uncanny”. Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 2 no. 1 (1997): 7-16. Lanthimos, Yorgos (Director) and Efthymis Filippou (Screenplay). Kynodontas. Greece: Boo Productions, 2009. Metzidakis, Stamos. “No Bones to Pick with Lanthimos’ Film Dogtooth”. Journal of Modern Greek Studies 32 (2014): 367-392. Psaras, Marios. "Dogtooth: Of Narrativity". In The Queer Greek Weird Wave. Palgrave Macmillan: London, 2016. Ripley, Marc. "Housed Nowhere and Everywhere Shut In: Uncanny Dwelling in Luis Bunuel's El angel exterminador". Bulletin of SPanish Studies 93 no. 4 (2016): 679-695. Russell, Dominique. “Luis Bunuel”. Senses of Cinema. April 2005. Accessed at: http://sensesofcinema.com/2005/great-directors/bunuel/, 25/05/2016. Sapir, Edward. Culture, Language and Personality. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958. Vellis, Erasmia. “Greek New Wave Cinema: Giorgos Lanthimos & Panos Koutras”. The Culture Trip. 28th November 2015. Accessed At: http://theculturetrip.com/europe/greece/articles/greek-new-wave-cinema-giorgos-lanthimos-panos-koutras/, 25/05/2016. Appendix Figure 1. Cutting the toes off the Barbie doll (11:55) Figure 2. The Phone aka salt (14:56) Figure 3. Talking to the Brother over the Wall (17:23) Figure 4. The Boundary is Re-established (41:09) Figure 5. The Attack of the Cat (43:06) Figure 6. “Bark! Bark!” Training of the Children/Dogs (45:32) Figure 7. Throwing the Toy Plane as a Real One Passes Overhead (51:57) 12