Dogtooth

Yorgos Lanthimos's Dogtooth won the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes 2009 and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, becoming the founding text of what critics began to call the Greek Weird Wave (Lanthimos, Athina Rachel Tsangari, Babis Makridis, Alexandros Avranas) a movement of low-budget, deadpan, formally disciplined provocations that emerged during the Greek financial crisis.

An unnamed family lives in a fenced suburban compound. The three adult children have never left it; their parents have raised them on a private dialect in which sea means a kind of armchair, and have invented an outside world full of dangers. The film follows the slow disintegration of this regime when an outsider (a security guard from the father's factory, brought in to provide sexual release for the son) introduces VHS tapes of Rocky and Jaws, and language begins to break down.

The performances are systematic and unfeeling, the cinematography is rigorously framed and bleached, and the violence (much of it self-inflicted) is presented with the same matter-of-factness as the family meals. The film is open to readings as critique of authoritarian parenting, of language under control regimes, of the Greek state itself. Lanthimos went on to The Lobster, The Favourite and Poor Things, but Dogtooth remains the purest distillation of his sensibility.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: The most influential European debut feature of the 2010s, and the film that opened the door to a decade of discomforting domestic-grotesque cinema. Strange enough to feel unprecedented even at second viewing.