Yorgos at the House

What Happens When the Cave Becomes Your World?

There are films you watch and then there are films that make you question the rules of the world you are living in.

Yorgos Lanthimos has always been interested in the second kind.

For our Film Club, we talked about Dogtooth, a film that begins with what looks like a family and slowly reveals itself as something much stranger: a completely constructed reality, where language, knowledge, desire and even the outside world are controlled by the people who claim to be protecting you.

It is absurd, uncomfortable and often very funny in the way only Lanthimos can be.

And, as usual, the more you try to understand what is happening, the stranger the question becomes.

What if the world you know is only the world you have been taught?

That became one of the questions we kept coming back to after the film.

It made us think about Plato’s Allegory of the Cave: the idea that people can spend their entire lives watching shadows on a wall and believing those shadows are reality. And if someone eventually turns around and sees the world outside the cave, would they even recognise it as real?

Dogtooth takes this philosophical question and turns it into a family home.

The children have never been allowed to see the world outside. Their parents have constructed their reality so completely that even language becomes a tool of control. Words don't mean what we think they mean. The outside world becomes a terrifying abstraction. The family home becomes the entire universe.

The cave has become the world.

And perhaps the most disturbing part is not that the children are being lied to.

It is that they have no way of knowing they are being lied to.

That made our conversation after the film less about whether the parents were simply “bad” and more about how much of our own understanding of the world is constructed by the people, institutions and environments around us.

How do you know what is real if you have never been given another version?

How much of what we call freedom depends on knowing that another possibility exists?

And what happens when the person who tells you they are protecting you is also the person deciding what you are allowed to see?

These questions are part of what makes Lanthimos so interesting to me.

His films often take something completely ordinary: a family, a relationship, a workplace, a hotel, a dinner table — and remove the invisible rules we normally take for granted. Suddenly we are looking at our own social behaviour from a strange distance.

Dogtooth does this particularly brutally.

The family operates according to a set of rules that seem ridiculous to us, but within their closed system they make perfect sense. And that is where the film becomes uncomfortable: the further we get into their world, the more we start thinking about our own.

Because maybe the question isn't only who is inside the cave.

Maybe it is also who built it.

And whether we would recognise our own cave if someone showed it to us.

That felt like the perfect kind of film for the Film Club.

Not because everyone needed to leave with the same interpretation, but because everyone left with something to argue about.

Someone saw the film as a story about control. Someone else saw it through language. Someone else couldn't stop thinking about the parents. Someone else was still trying to work out what exactly Lanthimos was asking us to look at.

And somewhere between all those interpretations, the film became bigger than the film itself.

Which is probably why we keep doing this.

We watch something together, and then we find out what everyone else saw.