Dogtooth by Yorgos Lanthimos

Lanthimos does what I like most about my favorite movies: he unearths the unspoken, overlooked, arbitrary, and taken-for-granted details that lie beneath common institutions we engage in every day. I concede that his tone and accent are too grotesque for my taste. Still, I can't deny that he crafted a film that is hyper-focused on tearing at the seams of our assumptions about family, sex, marriage, gender, and patriarchy. While each of these details struck me, I think Lanthimos' film uniquely stands out in its (perhaps concealed) commentary on jurisprudence.

Robert Cover, a legal scholar, has a very famous article called Nomos and Narrative. He looks at how our legal and political systems are necessarily premised on a set of founding myths and narratives that guide what laws get passed, how those laws become worded, and what it takes for people to buy into them and ultimately assemble to form a juridical community.

Cover's thoughts translate nicely to this film. Although Lanthimos' work is certainly not concerned with policies and laws in a literal sense, the film explores how rules are instituted and enforced, the implicit stories they are built upon, and what penalties arise when the rules are broken. Even though this movie is aimed at untangling questions of family and gender more explicitly, the implicit logic beneath many of the interactions between the parents and children, as well as between the children themselves, is predicated on a set of rules and laws instituted by the father and assumed de facto by all members of the family. Such regulations are routinely challenged by the family members and we begin to see in the last four scenes, roughly, what a new juridical nomos looks like in this legal microcosm.

There are some spaces where Cover's thought doesn't translate as smoothly, however. For one, Lanthimos doesn't do enough to expose us to what the father's life prior to starting his family was like, which would supply important gumption to fulfill Cover's claims about what constitutes the "founding narrative" that influences rulemaking. It's not to say that Lanthimos needed that detail (arguably, extremely unnecessary and would even have a negative impact on the father's authoritarian demeanor), but rather if we are trying to view this film as an application of Cover, we would face some weak spots. It is certainly not a 1:1 fit.

Nonetheless, even with a caveat in place, Lanthimos and Cover are closer than what meets the eye. The question of what makes rules, whether they are placed on any legitimate basis, and how they came into fruition are essential questions at the core of both of their works.