Alps (2011)
Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos
A nurse, a paramedic, a gymnast and her coach offer a service for hire wherein they stand in for dead people by appointment, hired by relatives, friends or colleagues of the deceased, to assist with the grieving process.
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What critics compared Alps to
His international breakout, Dogtooth (which earned an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film), and his follow-up, Alps, both operate in the same calmly intense, beautifully composed mode, like Wes Anderson films with all the quirk and pastel color burned off.
The step-by-step reveal of a proscribed “world” will be familiar to viewers of Lanthimos’s previous films written with Filippou, recalling as it does the slow feeling out of the walls around the family compound in Dogtooth (2009), or the immersion into the rites of the grief cult in Alps (2011), though the scale here is more ambitious here than in previous works, with each new wrinkle in the narrative complicating the previously established dichotomy, and introducing new comic possibilities.
In Kinetta, his solo debut feature, it was three people involved with a seaside hotel in the off-season (naturally there are parallels with The Lobster in location), in Dogtooth it was a terrifying take on a nuclear family, and in Alps it was a troupe of pseudo-performers unveiling the absurd human response to grief.
After Dogtooth and Alps , Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos and his regular screenwriter, Efithimis Filippou continue to mine an absurdist seam of black comedy-drama in their first English-language outing.
As director Yorgos Lanthimos’s previous efforts Dogtooth and Alps are studies in emotional conflict and dictatorial control, so too is The Lobster .
Yorgos Lanthimos is the director who reinvigorated Greek cinema with his dark, absurdist films Dogtooth and Alps .
This isn't the first time this year that we've seen a role somewhat like this: The little-seen Alps (from the same Greek filmmaker, Yorgos Lanthimos, who previously came up with Dogtooth) was about a group of people who are hired by the grieving to fill in for their dead loved ones.
Monsieur Oscar could be a member of the strange band of misfits from Yorgos Lanthimos's Alps , filling with performance all that's lacking in the world, giving the living something to actually live for.
If you answered affirmatively to these questions, I urge you to watch The Killing of a Sacred Deer, the latest ingenious and tragic brain-teaser from Greek helmer Yorgos Lanthimos, author of Dogtooth, Alps, and The Lobster.
“That critical moment we both knew would come someday – here it is…” After the jet-black social satire of Dogtooth , the role-playing bereavement of Alps and the quasi-sci-fi tragicomedy of The Lobster , Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos sets his sights on something altogether more unsettling.
Lanthimos followed Dogtooth up with Alps , which picked up the thread of Dogtooth‘s manufactured reality, telling the story of an organization of people who provide a service to grieving families by essentially acting as temporary stand-ins for the deceased, until the families are ready to let go.
Though certainly reminiscent of the films of those other masters, it still speaks with Lanthimos’ voice, the one that made “Alps” and “The Lobster” so distinctive.
For the most part, this is a development that I have been perfectly happy with—i admired the bleak vision, originality and formal precision of such provocations as “Dogtooth” and “Alps” and while I wasn’t quite as taken with “The Lobster,” his first conscious stab at breaking through to a truly international audience, as others were, it was certainly a unique moviegoing experience and the quirky humor that he infused the material with helped to further enliven things.
With the successive features Dogtooth, Alps, and The Lobster, Yorgos Lanthimos seemed to be going down the same route as Wes Anderson, i.e. become one of those auteurs who refines rather than expands on his idiosyncrasies, making largely interchangeable films on an ever grander scale but with diminishing returns.