Epilogue

Abstract

In Dogtooth’s final scene the father drives his car to work as usual. The old Mercedes crosses Lanthimos’s extreme long shot left to right and stops in the middle of the frame and in front of the big factory. The father gets out of the car and enters the building. The film then cuts to a closer shot of the Mercedes’s boot and lingers on that frame for about half a minute. A disconcerting quietness pervades the film’s final shot. It is a moment of suspension, of suspense, the agonizing silence of anticipation, during which the viewer’s desire to see the boot opened grows. For Dogtooth’s final shot is haunted by the preceding sequence, in which the audience have witnessed the older daughter breaking her dogtooth with one of her brother’s dumbbells and then hiding herself in the car-boot in an attempt to escape the oppressive contours of her totalitarian familial space. However, Lanthimos once more disappoints our expectations. The film cuts to black before the end credits appear. The film’s denouement acquires a resonance that is both tragic and enigmatic. For, rather than offering a meaningful closure, Lanthimos’s film dissolves in yet another meaningless foreclosure; indeed, in the foreclosure of meaning. As the Mercedes’s boot remains firmly closed denying any access to the older daughter’s fate, the film itself opens a gap, a void in the realm of meaning. One might wonder what this gesture is all about. I would call it an ethical one.