Episode Transcript
Hello everyone! My name is Carolyn Smith-Hillmer and I am the Final Girl on 6th Ave. Today’s episode is brought to you by me being on muscle relaxers, so it is absolutely time to party! I am going to be discussing the Greek movie Dogtooth. I wish I was excited to tell you about this movie, but I am so sorry for what you are about to listen to because I am going to be thinking about this movie for many, many, many days…
This film came out in 2009 and was directed by Yorgos Lanthimos. You can watch Dogtooth on AMC+, it will run you roughly 1 hour and 37 minutes and it is unrated. Here is the summary of the movie: “A controlling, manipulative father locks his three adult offspring in a state of perpetual childhood by keeping them prisoner within the sprawling family compound.” The tagline for this film is “The cat is the most feared animal there is!”
If you are going to stick with me through this episode, thank you so much. If you are not, then I understand because I am not sure I would either. Enough time for chit chat, let’s get on with it.
The film opens with a cassette tape player (haven’t seen one of those in a long time). The tape player is playing a language-learning tape. The four words for the lesson are sea, motorway, carbine, and excursion. There is a man in the bathroom listening to the tape provide the words used in a sentence. The weird part is that the words are used incorrectly. For example, one of the examples is “the sea is the part of the chair…” There is a woman in the bathroom also doing the language lesson. There is also another younger woman in the bathroom. She wants to run the bathroom faucet on hot water and all hold their fingers under it for as long as they can, the last person with their finger in the water wins. She is making up a game.
Cut to a woman in the passenger seat of a car blindfolded. She is wearing a security uniform. There is a man driving her. He is asking her about herself and if she has washed herself and her hair. She says she did yesterday. Seemingly she is blindfolded so she doesn’t know where she is going. The man brings her to his house. The son is exercising with an acordian-type piece of equipment. The security guard and the son are in a room with a bed and are going to have sex with one another. It feels very awkward even to watch. And I am not sure how old the son is or the woman is or if this is even something that can be considered consensual because it seems like the dad is forcing this encounter onto them both.
The older sister is in the living room and makes small talk with Christina the security guard. She asks Christina if she will stay for dinner because they are having burgers but she says she cant stay. They talk more about favorite foods like cheese pie and fish soup. Christina ends up staying for a little while. The father starts to film the daughters and Christina sitting on the couch together. The son joins. Christina just wants to die, you can absolutely tell. And then she gets back in the car with the dad and the dad takes her back to wherever she’s from. She blindfolds herself in the car again.
The kids seem to be learning everything from language to basic math from the tape player. The younger daughter mutilates a barbie doll with scissors and screams while she is inflicting the pain on the doll. The son gets dressed up in a button-down shirt and shines his shoes. He counts the stickers on his headboard. All of the children are getting dressed up for some unknown occasion.
They did all of that for a normal family dinner. At the table, the kids ask their dad for things like iodine and band-aids and vitamins and eyebrow tint. The dad says he will pick it up for them. The younger daughter asks her mom for the telephone and her mother hands her a salt shaker, so the kids are learning the wrong words for things. How fucking confusing is that!!! dad asks the son how many stickers are on the bed and the son says 76. The sisters have less so the son gets to pick the entertainment for after dinner. He picks to watch a video. So we are thinking we are going to watch a movie. But actually, the video the dad plays are home videos of the family and the kids know all of the words and are mouthing along to the video while it plays. I am not sure how they earn the stickers but I would try to win every single week to avoid watching a video of myself.
The son is now washing the car outside and goes to a giant bush to talk to the bush about how he washes the car better and details the car better. He is angry at this bush and starts to throw rocks at it. The parents notice from their bedroom window. He tells his mom “he started throwing rocks at me” and she says “your brother would never throw rocks at you” but he was talking to a fucking bush so I don’t understand. Seemingly he is in trouble because he is made to hold Listerine in his mouth until the mom says he can spit it out. It is their punishment.
The car drives away and the whole family is outside. An airplane flies over the house and the younger daughter says she wishes the plane would fall. The mother slaps her and says that whoever deserves it will get the falling plane. I think that only the dad is allowed to leave the house. He pulls into work at a factory and Christina greets him at the gate. He asks when she is coming over again and if she is wearing the perfume he bought for her. He smells her just in case she’s lying.
At home, the younger daughter is reading an anatomy book and the older daughter says she has had a stomach ache since last night. The younger sister plays doctor with her and says to rest and not work out. She says we have 20 minutes, to play with me, and that she has a new anesthetic to try out. Whatever it is, they are using a towel to huff it. Whoever wakes up first wins. Another game she has invented. The girls pass out on the bed with the towels on their faces. At work, dad is talking to a coworker about some marketing (??) materials and the coworker asks how his wife is doing. Dad says she is the same and the coworker encourages him to take her out, even if she is in a wheelchair. She is literally not in a wheelchair lol. Dad uses this lie as a reason to not have the coworker over for dinner.
At home, mom calls dad on the hideous green telephone to ask about his day and tell him about the older daughter’s tummy ache. Cut to a dog training facility, the dad shows up to get his dog back. The dog is not done being trained. The dad leaves without it. He is then seen taking water bottles out of the back of the car and cutting the labels off of them and throwing them away in an outside trash can. At home later that night, the mom and dad have sex while wearing headphones. No idea what they are listening to. The next day, the kids keep making up games to play. Their mom sits in a central area of the yard and the kids are blindfolded and have to find her. This game is timed. I bet they earn stickers for these games. The sister takes the pound cake to the same fence her brother was angry at and starts to throw the cake over the fence. I guess they are not mad at the bush but are actually mad at something they think is on the other side.
Christina comes back over and is fed up with this sex schedule with the son. She is not getting anything out of it if you know what I mean. So Christina approaches the older daughter when she is the cleaning and closes her bedroom door and tells the daughter that if she gives her oral sex, Christina will give her a headband that the daughter has complimented before. Then, the two sisters are hanging out and the older sister tells the younger sister that if she licks her shoulder, she will give her the headband. She agrees.
Outside, the children are playing and they are playing with a toy airplane. Now I see why the daughter wanted the real plane to fall out of the sky – she thinks they are the same size and she wanted the real airplane to fall so she could have another toy. The brother starts to fight with her over it and she throws it over the fence on the outside of their compound (let’s call it what it is) and the brother is pissed because he knows he cannot go get it. Inside, the sister sneak attacks her brother with a huge knife and cuts his arm. She gets in trouble with her mom and her mom slaps the shit out of her. So the son asks his dad to get the airplane from outside the fence. He drives the car out of the gate while the son walks next to the car. He never steps outside of the yard this whole time. The dad probably had the car in case the son tried to run. That night, the giant son climbs into bed with his parents to sleep.
The next morning, he is doing cartwheels in the yard and sees a cat. Everyone is super scared of it because I am pretty sure they have never seen a cat before. The brother kills the cat with a pair of lawn shears. On his way home, dad tears his pants and clothes and pours fake blood on himself. He says that the brother on the other side of the fence was killed by a cat just like the one that was in the yard today. He says it's called a cat (bc they didn’t know what it was) and that cats are the most dangerous animal there is in the world and they eat the flesh of children. He then makes the kids get down on all fours and bark like dogs.
They have a funeral-adjacent service for the “dead brother” by wearing all black and throwing flowers over the fence. The kids go swimming and practice giving one another CPR. That is actually useful so I am not sure where they learned that. the parents watch porn together on the couch and the mom tells the dad she is pregnant with twins, one boy, and one girl. The dad tells the kids “your mother will give birth to two kids and a dog” which literally makes no sense. The kids are not super thrilled that she is pregnant but the mom says if the kids can behave, she will avoid giving birth altogether. But if they don’t, then she has no choice but to birth them.
The dad makes the kids have a contest to hold their breath. The winner gets a sticker. The mom throws a larger toy airplane in the yard and the kids truly think it fell from the sky. They race to go get it. The sisters lay in bed that night and the younger sister offers to lick the older sister again in exchange for a gift. The older sister has nothing to give her, but the younger sister does it anyway. We can assume that this time she gives her sister oral sex. The dad later brings home some fish and puts them in the pool in the backyard. One of the daughters comes inside to get her dad and says that there are fish in the pool and he has to come to get them. She says there are 2. He counts 3 and he jumps in to get them. Fast forward we are at dinner and the dad is going over the rules of when the kids can leave the house. They can leave the compound when one of their dog teeth falls out. They can only leave the house in the car, but they cannot learn to drive until that same dogtooth in reference grows back. So basically they will never leave. The older daughter asks what the word pussy means bc she saw it on a tape label on the top of the VCR. The mom tells her that it is a light source.
The dad puts on a record and talks over the singer the whole time which is annoying as fuck. Christina is putting on her clothes to leave and tells the son about a dream she had where he was a zombie. Christina then goes into the older girl’s room and undresses. She brings her hair gel in exchange for oral sex. The daughter says she doesn’t want that present and wants something else in exchange. She wants some movies that Christina has in her purse and Christina says no, so the daughter says she will tell her parents that Christina made her lick her “keyboard” because again, the parents teach them the wrong words for things. Christina agrees to give her the tapes and says she needs them back next week because she has to return them.
The older daughter that night is in the living room trying to watch the tape from Christina. Her dad catches her sitting downstairs but doesn’t find the tapes. The movie was Rocky apparently because she is mimicking fighting and is spitting out cranberry juice like she is getting hit in the face. We can assume that the other movie is Jaws, because she starts talking about specific breeds of sharks and pretending to be one in the pool. She basically starts to only speak in movie dialogue. She gives her dad the tapes and he taps them to his hand and beats her head with them. She lays with her sister after and gives a massage. She says she wants her younger sister to call her Bruce (so year she definitely watched Jaws).
Dad goes to Christina’s house and beats her the VCR player. Before he leaves, he tells Christina that he hopes her kids are born with bad personalities because she has caused irreparable harm to his family. That night, the son screams out in pain and the parents run to his room to see the younger daughter has a hammer and is standing over her brother. He says she hit him with the hammer. She says she saw a cat come in through the window and was trying to hit it. The dad slaps the son after asking him if he took precautions to make sure that the cat didn’t enter the room. Then the parents go downstairs and have a literal silent conversation. They are mouthing words but no sound is coming out. They talk about how they need to find someone to replace Christina but that no one else will ever be allowed to enter the house. So they let the brother choose one of the sisters. After fondling them both, he chooses the older sister.
That night, the older sister has her mom do her hair and makeup for her first sexual encounter with her brother. She really does not want to do this obviously. After, she starts to quote violent dialogue from Rocky to her brother. The next day, the son calls for his mother outside and says he found 2 zombies. Who fucking knows what he was looking at because I didn’t see anything. The younger daughter sneaks into her parent's room and tries to use the phone. She puts it away without successfully calling anyone.
The sisters are getting ready for their parent's anniversary party and the older sister asks her younger sister to check and see if her dogtooth is about to fall out. The younger one says no. cut to the sisters dancing together and the brother playing guitar. They are performing for their parents. The younger asks if she can be done and the older sister keeps dancing. She starts to do the splits and erratic dancing like dirty dancing and footloose. She gets super tired from it all, and I can't blame her. The mother finally stops her after getting uncomfortable. The older daughter finally gets to sit down and have cake.
The older daughter is now in the bathroom with maybe a 2-pound weighted dumbbell. She is hitting herself in the face and smiling. Blood is running into the sink down her face and she has successfully knocked out her dogtooth. She walks outside through the yard to the car and gets into the trunk. She climbs in and closes the trunk door. the younger sister goes into her parent's bedroom and starts to lick her dad's chest which is fucking disgusting. She wants the harpoon gun. The dad tells her that it is dangerous and goes into the bathroom to find the dogtooth and bloody sink. He cannot find the older daughter. He runs out looking for her frantically on foot and doesn’t find her, in or outside of the compound.
The whole family is in a frenzy now. The brother is barking and the sister is yelling Bruce. At the gate, the mom and the son, and the younger sister are barking on all fours. The parents sit outside at the patio table and the dad says he will go pick up the dog. The brother and younger sister sleep in the same bed. The dad leaves for work the next morning and the trunk of the car is still closed. He arrives at work and goes inside. The movie ends with the camera focused on the trunk of the car and the screen cuts to black.
The older sister is the only one smart enough to get out of this shithole life her parents have given her. She slowly uncovers that her world is not limited to what is inside her gated home. I think the worst part is that the parents seem to be enjoying doing all of this to their kids. We know that the mom is not pregnant because frankly, she is not of healthy age to be carrying twins. And the dad knows that his wife cannot birth a dog but chooses to tell his kids anyway. Everything is a control tactic. And we can go ahead and assume that the brother that lives outside of the fence never existed. I know for a fact that the parents just liked telling their kids that so that they could watch their kids be angry at the fence. That is hilarious, even I would do some shit like that.
I thought it was really odd that the kids did know how to do some things correctly but other things they did not. Like how did they know how to do CPR but they think that the word telephone means salt shaker???
I mean really in all seriousness this movie is about training and manipulation if that wasn’t shoved in your face enough already. The dad trains his family like dogs. He also has a dog that he has dropped off at the dog training facility. He checks on the dog and the dog isn’t ready to leave the training facility yet. The kids (in the mind of the dad and in reality) are not prepared for the real world either. The dog is kept in a cage, the kids are kept in the house (their cage). He just sees his kids like dogs. That is probably why the kids literally do not have names, not even in the credits. They are the son, the older daughter and the younger daughter. They literally don’t matter.
Roger Ebert in his review did give this film 3 stars, but he did say he didn’t laugh during the movie. I definitely 100% laughed quite a bit during this movie because I was so uncomfortable. Truly, this movie is just so odd to me. I think Ebert said it best: “His cinematography is like a series of family photographs of a family with something wrong with it.”
More broadly, I think this is just a film about parenting styles. There are so many different styles of parenting in the world and it takes the protective parent to the extreme. And this film does that the best, right? So many parents take the approach of “Well my kids aren’t allowed to watch that movie or go to that person’s house or hear that word, etc” and that never made sense to me. Would you rather let them find out 18 years later that the world is fucked up? Or maybe you could just do your job as a parent and talk about real things in the world and teach your kids? Food for thought. I always and I do mean ALWAYS think that the style of parenting that tries to shield their kids from the real world is out of laziness. They would rather defer that to someone else and make it someone else’s responsibility. “Why would I talk to my kids about sex? They will just learn it from their friends, so that takes away my responsibility to teach my kids about topics that make me uncomfortable.” Like if you don’t want to be a parent, just say so. I grew up in a household where if I asked my parents a question, it was answered. I was never lied to or told that it meant something different or told that I wasn’t old enough to watch or hear or read something. My parents raised me to be an adult. And even now, I am not shocked when someone tells me something about the world. Oh, a man in Florida killed some people? Yeah, I believe you. Not surprised by how evil the world can be, which made my transition from living with my parents to living on my own actually pretty easy.
But in all, it just feels like a criticism of that super overprotective parenting style, and a good critique of it at that. The parents taught their kids that the salt shaker is called a telephone and literally no one questions that. Until of course, the older daughter watches Jaws and Rocky and finds out that a telephone is an actual device that she can use to call people. That was her great awakening for sure. But to blindly obey and accept whatever people tell you just because they are older than you means absolutely nothing. That is why I have never understood the premise of “back talking”. If someone tells me to do something but I don’t understand why I have to do it, then I'm not going to do it. For example, if my parents told me to brush my teeth twice a day but I had not been doing that already, then I would want to know why I was being told to do that. why should I devote more of my time to doing something like this? Is there a purpose? Oh, it will make my teeth healthier? Then that sounds great, I will do that. I gotta have some reasoning.
I also think some parents have this twisted narcissistic view of themselves that they are inherently perfect people and have never done anything wrong in their lives, so they want their kids to be exact copies of them. This takes away your child’s ability to think freely, which I personally think does your child a humongous disservice, but also puts your child at risk of being easily impressionable. “I did coke at that party last weekend because my friends told me to”. It also sets up the child for failure. You take your kids to church every single Sunday unless you are dying or in the hospital, so when your kid grows up and moves out and you find out they hate going to church, now you’re mad at them because that is not how you raised them. Let it go. That type of parenting and control is far from healthy.
You can see the perfect example of this with the children in the movie. Christina tells the older daughter to lick her vagina. This doesn’t mean anything to the older daughter, she doesn’t understand what that means. And that makes it even more terrible because her naivety makes her the perfect target for a sexual predator. But had her parents told her that that is not appropriate unless it is consensual and there is no weird power dynamic at play, she has been taken advantage of greatly? So her transition to the real world when she gets out of the trunk of the car while not be an easy or healthy one. Great parenting, mom and dad.
