After premiering at the Cannes Film Festival in 2009, the Greek film Dogtooth took the independent film world by storm last year, shaking up even the most hardened critics with its depiction of a family who cloister their children, treat them with extreme harshness and give them fundamentally insane ideas of how the world works. The movie, by some miracle, was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, but of course was beaten out by a more accessible, less soul-crushing film, In A Better World.
Happily, Dogtooth director Yorgos Lanthimos is not at all discouraged by the movie's lack of Oscar success, and may very well be returning to this year's Cannes with a film he promises is even more dark and hilarious. Talking to The Los Angeles Times, Lanthimos described his next effort, titled Alps, as "going to each extreme a little bit more" than Dogtooth. It spins off from the notion of people standing in for each others' lost loved ones, replicating personality and gestures in a way that sounds creepy, preposterous, and yet totally reasonable for Lanthimos. He's not certain he'll have it finished in time for Cannes this year, but one way or another we'll be getting another glimpse into his strange world very very soon.
If you haven't yet seen Dogtooth, it's still available on Netflix Watch Instantly, only 93 minutes long and totally unforgettable.
