greek weird wave

Greek cinema turned strange around 2009, in the middle of the country's financial collapse, and Steve Rose coined the term in The Guardian in 2011. The house is where the wave lives: three grown children in Dogtooth are kept inside their parents' garden fence, taught the wrong words for things off cassette tapes and told the outside will kill them. Yorgos Lanthimos, Athina Rachel Tsangari and Alexandros Avranas share that same enclosure and the same flat delivery: Marina studies human beings the way David Attenborough studies mammals in Attenberg, and Miss Violence opens on an eleven-year-old's birthday party and a doting grandfather before something terrible happens in the middle of it. The camera sits still and square in front of all of it, holding a fixed frame while the performances stay flat and the situation gets worse, so the joke and the horror land together.

Distinguish from Shares the deadpan register and enclosed settings of Slow Cinema but is more aggressive and narratively driven. The absurdism overlaps with Surrealist Cinema but is rooted in social allegory — family and institution as microcosm — rather than dream logic or the unconscious.