: It won the Un Certain Regard prize at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 83rd Academy Awards.
The film follows a husband and wife who keep their three adult children entirely isolated on a gated estate. To ensure they never leave, the parents have constructed a completely fake reality: Fabricated Rules: dogtooth -2009-
The children are told the outside world is dangerous and that they can only leave once their "dogtooth" (a canine tooth) falls out—a physical impossibility for adults. Redefined Language: : It won the Un Certain Regard prize
In the landscape of modern cinema, few films arrive with the unsettling force of a grenade disguised as a family drama. In 2009, a little-known Greek director named Yorgos Lanthimos detonated that grenade with Dogtooth ( Kynodontas ). What emerged was not merely a film, but a cinematic earthquake—a strange, brutalist, and hypnotic allegory about control, language, and the terrifying architecture of the nuclear family. Redefined Language: In the landscape of modern cinema,
In a desperate act of self-emancipation, the eldest daughter uses a heavy object to violently knock out her own "dogtooth," believing this fulfills her father's condition for freedom. She then hides in the trunk of her father’s car as he leaves for work. The film ends on an ambiguous note, with the father parking at his factory, unaware his daughter is in the trunk, leaving her fate unknown. Themes and Recognition