Kynodontas is Giorgos Lanthimos‘ newest film, starring Aggeliki Papoulia, Mary Tsoni, Hristos Passalis, Anna Kalaitzidou, Michele Valley and Christos Stergioglou.

Plot:
Three siblings – two sisters (Aggeliki Papoulia and Mary Tsoni) and a brother (Hristos Passalis) – live with their parents (Michele Valley and Christos Stergioglou). Despite them being adults already, neither of the children has ever left the family home, the parents having told them that it is too dangerous for them to leave the garden. But when the father starts bringing home Christina (Anna Kalaitzidou) to take care of the son’s sexual needs, the introduction of such a foreign body starts disrupting the family routine.

Kynodontas is, on the one hand, a excellent film – well-acted, beautifully shot, interesting concept. On the other hand, it gets a little long and for me it was too weird to be really (emotionally) effective.

[SPOILERS]

The concept is fascinating, especially when it starts dealing with the issues of language and how you have to change the meaning of words to not introduce the concepts they describe. One has to wonder: why would you introduce the words at all? Why explain to them that a telephone is a saltshaker instead of not teaching them the word telephone? There’s a lot to discuss in these little language lessons.

In some instances it falls apart though, especially when you start to question how they got to where they are now. It doesn’t cost the father more than a minute of thought, after the situation with Christina gets out of hand, to decide that from now the son should sleep with one of his sisters – so why not start doing it like that right away, instead of taking the considerable risk of introducing a stranger into their fragile ecosystem?*

The film is very well acted and beautifully shot (the light work especially was so good that even I noticed it). The pacing is a little off, though and it ends up feeling longer than it actually is.

Unfortunately, the film remains a little too weird and too far-fetched. You just never really get into the whole story and it’s easy to keep your distance from the horrible events that are shown. That makes the viewing more comfortable, but since you never have to experience on an emotional level, it just never affects quite like it could. [Or at least that’s how I experienced it. Maybe I’m a huge block of stone and other people are moved to  tears by the film.]

Summarising: On an intellectual level it’s brilliant, but other than that, it remains unengaging.

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*We could also discuss here how the parents apparently adhere to the notion that a man’s sexuality has to be fulfilled with a woman, otherwise he’ll probably go insane, but that a woman’s sexuality doesn’t need to be expressed since no such precautions are taken for the daughters. Only the son gets his sex delivered and they’d rather resort to incest than to have him wank.