Kynodontas could be read as a superlative example of absurdist cinema, or possibly something entirely the reverse – a clinically, unsparingly intimate piece of psychological realism. […] Somewhere in the Greek countryside, a wealthy middle-aged businessman and paterfamilias has a handsome house with beautiful grounds and a gorgeous swimming pool – the upkeep of which this family appears to manage without external help. He has a quietly submissive wife, and three handsome children in their 20s: two daughters and one son…
But something is very wrong with this picture. The children, as becomes chillingly clear, are infantilised: they have never been permitted to leave the family compound, and, like Baron von Trapp’s children responding to a naval whistle, they have been trained in obedience like dogs, woofing and leaping about on all fours to order, but also capable of walking and talking like convincing human beings, although their conversation has a stilted quality, as if in a light, hypnosis-induced trance…
It is a movie of southern Europe, which bears the influence of something more northern European. With its pristine clarity, refrigerated light and deadpan stabs of violence, it looks unmistakably like something by Michael Haneke or his Austrian contemporaries, Ulrich Seidl and Jessica Hausner. It also brought to my Anglo-Saxon mind William Golding and the early fiction of Ian McEwan. The scalp-prickling strangeness of a family that is outwardly normal yet privately horrific inevitably invites memories of Josef Fritzl and his cellar, and also for me, at one remove, Haneke’s The Seventh Continent. Perhaps the two sinister boys in Funny Games were brought up in a household like the one in Kynodontas… It is a film about the essential strangeness of something society insists is the benchmark of normality: the family, a walled city state with its own autocratic rule and untellable secrets.

Peter Bradshaw, “The Guardian”, 22 April 2010