How Lanthimos Turns the Body into a Battlefield

In Yorgos Lanthimos’s cinema, the body and language are never mere instruments of storytelling. They are bloody battlegrounds for the possession of the subject’s truth. Placing “Dogtooth (2009)” and “Poor Things (2023)” side by side, one encounters two complementary philosophical treatises attacking a single fundamental question from opposite ends of the spectrum: How, exactly, is a human being made?

Lanthimos’s answer moves across a radical axis. On one end, Dogtooth constructs the human subject through the freezing of desire and the fabrication of a false symbolic order. On the other, Poor Things delivers a subject reborn through pure desire itself, via a grotesque and uncanny return to the mother. Read through the lens of the family as ideological apparatus and a psychoanalytic-feminist interpretation of the body, what emerges is a clear trajectory in Lanthimos’s intellectual project: a shift from the tragedy of repression to the epic of liberation.

The Family as a Factory of Reality

What we see in Dogtooth is not a family. It is an ideological state apparatus in the most precise sense of the term. The French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser used this concept to describe structures that produce obedient subjects not through direct coercion or physical force, but through belief, identity formation, and the internalization of values. The family, the school, the media — all can function as such apparatuses. The enclosed villa of Dogtooth is exactly this: a machine engineered to manufacture consciousness, not through torture, but through total control over what counts as reality.

The father, as chief architect of this prison, does not merely regulate behavior. He confiscates and counterfeits language itself — the very raw material of thought. When the children are taught that "sea" is the word for a chair and that the "killer creature" is the cat, this is not a childish game. The aim is to construct a sealed world in which words refer only to each other, never to anything outside. A world entirely self-contained and synthetic.

But where is Lanthimos's subtler psychoanalytic blow? This falsification of language takes place in the total absence of maternal desire. The mother in this house is a complicit but instinctually hollow figure. What the film shows us is not birth, not a primal bodily bond between mother and child, but a decorative and obedient presence — as though she were hired solely to perform the symbolic role of "mother" and preserve the institution of the family. This void is, in psychoanalytic terms, a metaphor for the absence of that first, pre-linguistic, bodily relation between mother and infant — the very relation that psychoanalysis identifies as the precondition for a healthy entry into the symbolic order. The father of Dogtooth has replaced that order with a counterfeit version. The language he constructs is not a vehicle for desire; it is a concrete wall erected against it. This factory does not suppress desire. It burns the roots before the first shoot can break the surface.

Poor Things begins with a familiar architecture: a creating-father and a daughter held in subjugation. But everything has an inverted quality. Dr. Godwin Baxter is a father mutilated and damaged by classical patriarchy — someone who, unlike the father in Dogtooth, does not seek to imprison forever, but wishes to create a being who will ultimately taste freedom. The fundamental difference between the two films, however, lies in the inverted presence of the mother. In Poor Things, the mother is not a passive living presence but an "absent presence." Bella is, in fact, her own mother: the body of Victoria — a woman who has taken her own life — becomes the vessel for the mind of her own unborn child. Where Dogtooth’s father fills the void of maternal desire with the dictatorship of language, Poor Things presents maternal instinct itself as the force pumped through the body into the child, the driving engine of liberation.

The Lawless Body Against the Law-Abiding Body

It is precisely here that a feminist reading of the body gains its full meaning. From the very beginning, Bella Baxter is a "body without organs" — a concept developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to describe a body not yet coded, not yet divided by social structures into pre-assigned roles and functions. A body in which no symbolic "organ" — mother, woman, wife, whore — has yet been labeled and assigned its social purpose. Bella's discovery of bodily pleasure is far more than individual curiosity. She is in the process of reclaiming a body that belonged to her mother, yet from which her mother was never permitted to take pleasure. Victoria represents the classic subject of feminist discourse: a woman whose body was always the property of another — husband, society — and who found no escape from that appropriation except the destruction of the body itself. But Bella, with a mind still unschooled in "womanhood as convention," rediscovers this body from scratch — a body that embraces pleasure without shame and desire without guilt.

Set this bodily liberation against the imprisoned bodies of Dogtooth, and the contrast becomes stark. There, too, the bodies are fevered with desire, but that desire must either be discharged within the father’s sanitized frameworks or pathologically suppressed. The son’s sexual encounters with the father’s employee are mechanical obligation, not pleasure. The daughters' strange, dissonant dances are an unconscious attempt to release libidinal energy from bodies that have no language for self-expression. The dance in Dogtooth is a spasm of repression — a physical scream condemned to silence. Bella’s wild, delirious dancing in Lisbon, by contrast, is a celebration of absolute liberation. One is the dance of death; the other, the dance of life.

The Mother, the Child, and the Fate of the Subject

To stop at these binaries is to miss Poor Things's deepest layer. Bella is not simply a liberated woman. She is a project through which the mother completes, via her child, her own unfinished and defeated history. Victoria could not survive in a world that reduced women to the binary of the saintly and the fallen. But Bella moves through every one of these roles not out of desperation, but with the curiosity of a conqueror. Her journey to the brothels of Paris is precisely the descent into the labyrinth from which her mother had fled. Bella's radicalization inside that same brothel — her turn toward socialism — reveals this child-mother as something more: a force actively dismantling the very social order that killed her mother.

This dialectic is what finally separates the fates of the subjects in the two films. In Dogtooth, when the eldest daughter discovers the lie at the heart of her world, that discovery destroys her. She has no psychological architecture for absorbing the outside world. The Hollywood tapes she watches cause the entire code of the domestic universe to collapse inside her, and what follows is psychic disintegration. She breaks her own canine tooth to break free, but behind that locked door there is no salvation — only absolute darkness. The reason is precise: she had no mother to transmit the instinct for survival, and a father who had stolen language from her.

Poor Things stages the same moment with an entirely different outcome. When General Alfie — Victoria's former husband — invokes the law to claim ownership over Bella's body, he arrives as the updated version of Dogtooth's patriarch, wearing a new face. But instead of collapse, Bella responds with a grotesque act: grafting the brain of a goat onto General Alfie's skull. This ending must be read across three distinct layers.

First, it is the mother’s revenge: Victoria could not escape this order, but Bella reduces it to a ruminating animal.

Second, it is the child’s maturity: Bella does not self-destruct on the threshold of the outside world — she rewrites the terms of entry.

Third, and most crucially, it is the declaration of a new logic: a subject born in the embrace of desire does not reproduce the world through obedience. She reproduces it through creation.

In his journey from Dogtooth to Poor Things, Lanthimos has transformed Greek tragedy into a dark divine comedy. The imprisoned subject of Dogtooth, even when she awakens, finds that waking is her ending. But Bella Baxter is not a redeemed Victoria. She is the embodiment of redemption itself — a mother's body returned to the world with her child's mind, breathing life this time not through the narrow slit of the father's discipline, but through the wide and boundless aperture of desire.