"Dogtooth feels like a successor to the Yannis Economides film Matchbox (2002), which depicted the patriarchal dysfunction within a family trapped in an Athens apartment during a heat wave. Moreover, Lanthimos’s breakout borrowed heavily from Mexican director Arturo Ripstein’s 1972 film The Castle of Purity, which also featured a father who imprisoned his children in their house—based on a real criminal case in Mexico City. Besides the premise, specific scenes from the Mexican classic, such as the children bathing together, are directly echoed in Dogtooth, which led Ripstein to argue that he and Lanthimos should split the accolades for the latter film."
"In a 2021 Criterion Channel conversation between Richard Linklater and [Athina Rachel] Tsangari, who worked together on Slacker (1990) and Before Midnight (2013), Tsangari reveals that she had a mentor in Greek avant-garde filmmaker Nikos Papatakis, whose 1967 masterpiece The Shepherds of Calamity (a.k.a. The Shepherds of Disaster or Thanos and Despina) shares a number of similarities with the modern Weird Wave. A film about two shepherds who are competing for the hand of the daughter of the wealthiest man in the village, Shepherds of Calamity functions as an allegory for a society coming apart at the seams, anticipating the dictatorship in Greece that would intensify such fractures from 1967 to 1974."