A ‘disturbing’ film which features unsimulated sex scenes not only has a near perfect Rotten Tomatoes score, but it's also available to watch entirely for free.
Now, whilst this may sound pornographic, the director behind this has gone on to create Oscar-winning films, and this is one of his earliest classic movies.
With a Greek cast, the movie has been ‘weird’, ‘original’, and disturbing. Check out the trailer here:
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The film is called Dogtooth, and it was the breakthrough movie of Yorgos Lanthimos.
For those who have seen Lanthimos’ subsequent films, Poor Things, Kinds of Kindness, The Favourite, even Killing of a Sacred Deer, it will all make sense.
In the most loving way possible, all of Lanthimos’ films are truly, truly weird.
The film’s official synopsis reads: “A controlling, manipulative father (Christos Stergioglou) locks his three adult offspring in a state of perpetual childhood by keeping them prisoner within the sprawling family compound.
“The children are bored to tears in spite of distractions like Christina (Anna Kalaitzidou), an employee of their father's who makes regular visits to sexually service the son (Hristos Passalis).
“Increasingly curious about the outside world, the older daughter (Aggeliki Papoulia) hatches a plan to escape.”
The film was widely loved, with a score of 7.2 on IMDb, and 93 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.
The legendary Roger Ebert reviewed the film just three years prior to his death, and said: “Dogtooth is like a car crash. You cannot look away. The Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos tells his story with complete command of visuals and performances.
“His cinematography is like a series of family photographs of a family with something wrong with it. His dialogue sounds composed entirely of sentences memorized from tourist phrase books.”
Eric Kohn, reviewing the film for IndieWire, said: “Few movies convey such a deeply unnerving atmosphere in nearly every scene while simultaneously capitalizing on an absurd black comic sensibility.”
One five star review of the film on Letterboxd said: “Dogtooth is disturbing. It creeps into your psyche and stays there for days.
"It plays like an absurdist comedy at first but quickly shows its true colours.”
According to the BBFC (British Board of Film Classification), there was ‘real’ unsimulated sex in the film.
The classification said this was to ‘establish the unusual and dysfunctional lifestyle that results from the isolation orchestrated by the dictatorial father, including incest.”
If unusual and dysfunctional is your vibe then good news – you can watch Dogtooth for free on ITV X.
Topics: Film, TV and Film
Michael Slavin