Brutality and hilarity collide in Yorgas Lanthimos’s absurdist family affair. By TIM WONG.

IN THE mean-spirited tradition of Ulrich Seidl’s Dog Days, the dastardly Dogtooth (Kynodontas) goes someway to compensating – along with the excellent Blind Loves, also screening this year – for the Austrian director’s absence from recent New Zealand International Film Festivals (his vaunted Import/Export has yet to reach our shores). The story of captive siblings and their control-freak parents, the film observes its sexually frustrated characters, either on the giving or receiving end of cruel and bullying outbursts, with an inherited misery that’s both hilarious and monstrous to watch. Perversely, the grotesque lineage of Yorgas Lanthimos’s film extends even further towards Seidl’s homeland, whose unfortunate reputation for dungeons and incest now precedes itself. How exactly Dogtooth’s sociopathic figurehead – the Josef Fritzl-lite father of three adult children incarcerated in their own home – avoids this bad taste association completely is, simply put, through a wicked sense of humour. Deadpan editing, satiric know-how, and a consistent black comedy streak ensure Lanthimos’s film rises well above the lower depths its awkward subject matter may have otherwise dragged it down below.

Having made out this unexpectedly funny scenario as a far grimmer proposition than it actually plays, Dogtooth in its cool detachment and highly stylised vignettes is too much of a movie for its ugliness to be taken seriously. Constructed and composed so the banality is wonderful to stare at, Lanthimos has filmed something of a Wes Anderson look-a-like, preened and lustily shot, and yet with the glacial mundaneness of a Michael Haneke tableaux. The spectacle’s quietly deranged parents and emotionally stunted kids – whose existence has been reduced to a series of playground games involving punishment or reward – slowly reveal darker, more violent tendencies, however not before amusing us with a series of shocking and hysterical asides. Confined within the walls of an isolated country home, the siblings’ contrived environment gives rise to scenes of inspired, naive lunacy: one side-splitting instance, the butchering of a stray kitten with hedge clippers! In Dogtooth’s manipulated, inner world, cats are ruthless predators and hazardous words are replaced with a more innocuous vocabulary (e.g. vagina = keyboard). The first film from Greece to make official selection at Cannes in a decade (it went on to win Un Certain Regard), festival-goers here haven’t seen a Greek production in just as long. Those anticipating the delights of an Angelopoulos saunter though would be advised to leave their prudishness at the door; for all Dogtooth’s outlandish adolescence and exquisite, tormented comedy, the harsh reality of its circumstances follow a natural, justified, invaribly brutal course. That incestuous and abusive behaviour is somehow married with a comic sensibility makes this the surprise package of the festival thus far, a wildcard I’m thrilled programmers have dealt.