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While most critical reactions to Yorgos Lanthimos's film - (Dogtooth,) (2009) have been positive, as indicated by the Cannes Film Festival award it received, many people find it hard to understand and painful to watch. Combining extreme violence and humor in unusual ways, it includes scenes of extraordinary perversity and depravity. This essay argues that the film thereby constitutes a striking example of absurdist cinema in general and of what has been called the "Greek Weird Wave" in particular. For, it refuses to reassert or privilege certain long-standing artistic norms and conventions or traditional values over others. It thus encourages viewers to put aside qualms ("bones") they have with several scenes in order to appreciate better the questions the film raises about contemporary Western society, especially the social construction of the family in Greece, as well as the new ways the film allows us to rethink such questions.
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The ludic quality of my title is intentional. In dealing with a movie that few viewers know whether to take seriously or lightly, one should not expect otherwise. But, if the ambiguity of Yorgos Lanthimos's 2009 film is reason enough to tread lightly in attributing any specific tone or message to it, there is a more strategic reason for choosing this title: the constant, post- modern mixing and mingling of imagery, themes, and vocabulary found in it. There should be no bones to pick with Lanthimos's cinematographic work, therefore, because no one should take it either too seriously or too lightly.1 Moreover, in scrambling a few common Anglo-American locu- tions and associations between words for my title-most notably, "having a bone to pick," "picking on someone or something," and finally, the met- onymic connection between human or animal "bones" and "teeth"-the idea is to suggest that a large part of the conceptual significance of Lanthi- mos's film lies precisely in the imaginative, unstable gaps between all these objects, beings, words, and expressions, rather than primarily in visual aspects pertinent to typical cinematic readings. My point then is that such a linguistico-literary approach functions as a very useful supplement to more formalistic cinematic readings.
Like other recent Greek-language films such as Attenburg (2012), Strella (2009), and Knifer (2010), Dogtooth...