Alps

Another unique & remarkable film from director Yorgos Lanthimos. (...) Lanthimos continues to prove himself a supremely controlled, disciplined filmmaker: his use of focus alone could form the basis of a film school class, and it’s always interesting to note what he doesn’t show, frequently cutting off or obscuring faces and relying on body language. “Alps” has proven Lanthimos to be one of the most fascinating filmmakers anywhere right now, and, while there’s no immediate news on when it’ll hit on the U.S., or anywhere outside Greece, we’re confident it’ll be one of the most talked-about films of the next year: with so much to talk about, how could it not be?

Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos goes off piste, plunging us into a landscape that is not steep and snowy but flat and black in this spendidly icy picture. (...) The human race, Alps argues, is predominantly made up of bad actors, searching desperately for a part to play, a space to fill, a hole to slot into. Small wonder Nurse wants to mimic the dead. The role has already been road-tested and the grave is the most natural, neatest-fitting hole of all.

“Alps” is a slightly warmer film than its predecessor, but in its cockeyed, proudly foot-in-mouth way. (...) “Alps” elegantly provides a mirror hypothesis of people attempting to stall time and mortality after the fact of tragedy, like so much toothpaste scraped messily back into the tube; as studies in aggressive human denial, they make for a punishingly brilliant twin-set, with no pearls in sight.

Alps denies us such traditional cinematic handholds as rounded characters with backstories; a plot with an identifiable moral arc; neatly tied narrative ends; an easy-to-read ‘message’. Yet the film only very occasionally feels like a piece of self-indulgent arthouse mystification: most of the time, this story of a team of melancholy, oddball characters who help (or profit from) the bereaved by standing in for departed loved ones holds us emotionally and intellectually - and ends by saying something profound about a world in which ‘reality’ is just another TV format.

Yorgos Lanthimos postula su candidatura al palmarés final con Alps. (...) Los diálogos absurdos recuerdan a Canino, mientras que la rigidez del líder del grupo no está muy lejos del totalitarismo familiar del segundo largo de Lanthimos. A pesar de que la similitud entre ambas películas es un poco decepcionante, Alps logra tratar temas como la identidad, la pérdida, el control y la alienación.