Kynodontas (Dogtooth)

The lesser-known classic from Yorgos Lanthimos, director of Poor Things, The Favorite, and Killing of A Sacred Deer.

Dogtooth brutally deconstructs some of our most cherished postmodern utopias: the nuclear family, parent-child and sibling relations, and “home” itself. Dogtooth questions our shared notion of language itself as the domain of agreed-upon, possible meaning. It explores, instead, the possibility of man-made semantic dystopia. 

The screening will be introduced by Dr Kutay Onayli, Fellow by Examination at Magdalen College, Oxford, and co-curator of the Laughing at Utopia series with the TORCH Humour Network. A historian and literary scholar of the late Ottoman Empire and the Eastern Mediterranean, Dr Onayli studies mass-market satire and how laughter helped ordinary people make sense of identity, alienation and a world falling apart. That makes him an ideal guide to Lanthimos’s deadpan nightmare of a family sealed off from reality.

Part of Utopia Now!, a season exploring the role of the arts in making a better future possible.

About the Laughing at Utopia Film Series

This film series, curated by the TORCH Humour Network in collaboration with Ultimate Picture Palace, Oxford’s oldest independent cinema, explores the playful and provocative relationship between utopia and satire.

Find out more

Films in the series

• Tuesday 20 October : El ángel exterminador  (The Exterminating Angel), 1962, Luis Buñuel.
• Tuesday 10 November: Playtime, Jacques Tati. (Please note: This screening is taking place at Ultimate Picture Palace)
• Tuesday 17 November: Kynodontas (Dogtooth), Yorgos Lanthimos.
• Tuesday 1 December: Yek Tasadof-e Sade (It Was Just An Accident), Jafar Panahi. (Please note: This screening is taking place at Ultimate Picture Palace)