I’d heard the basic concept from the DVD box description, that the movie is about a small group who surrogate recently-deceased people to help their families adjust to the loss. That actually turned out to be extremely helpful while watching the movie, which dumps you into the middle of an unexplained situation even more than Dogtooth did.

From D. Kasman’s mixed (but largely disappointed) review:

Alps does not explore why the actors pursue their unreal profession (or passion?), nor how the victims deal with the false replication, nor the differences (or similarities) between ostensibly normal social interactions and those staged by the Alps group. Exploration is cut short in favor of the conceptual impact of the idea: everything serves to film an example of an isolated idea rather than build a cinematic world which contains ideas interacting. These ideas, pitched deadpan, are often very funny – a tone and a result at which Lanthimos clearly excels.

Kasman is right – the movie never pulls together and explains its concept, or explores the wealth of possible meanings and intricacies behind the movie’s netflix summary, or goes in any of the directions that any director given that plot description would travel. Lanthimos lingers on specific details, leaving the story abstract, and the movie begins to spiral into itself, as dialogue and mannerisms leave doubt as to whether any of the four Alps members have true selves (making it possibly a good double-feature with Holy Motors). Or perhaps I didn’t understand the movie at all. But I dug it.

Dancer:

Coach in foreground:

Sad-eyed nurse Aggeliki Papoulia (oldest daughter in Dogtooth and a great reason to watch both films) carries the bulk of the movie, meeting a young girl after a car accident and “replacing” her after her death, finally getting chased out of the house by the dead girl’s parents. Ariane Labed (Marina from Attenberg), is a dancer whose coach won’t let her replace anyone until she performs her routine. Ruthless mustachioed Alps leader Aris Servetalis does a good Bruce Lee impression. Then there’s the coach (Johnny Vekris in his only film, since he apparently died last year), who doesn’t do much.

F. Croce for Slant:

Assigning roles and doling out punishment to the other members of “Alps,” Servetalis’s Mont Blanc alternately suggests a theatrical troupe’s particularly strict director, the pimp in a ring of emotional prostitution, and, most evocatively, a younger version of the father from Dogtooth. Like that earlier film, Alps depicts the deforming effects of repression and substitution, with the avoidance of the reality of a loved one’s death being akin to the avoidance of the world beyond the gates of an isolated house. Where the family unit there was a cloistered horror garden, however, here it becomes an elusive, falsely idealized sanctuary in a world of desolate interactions. It’s no accident that Papoulia plays rebellious protagonists in both films, trying to break out of a home in one and trying to break into a home in the other.

Odd movie, weirdly off-center compositions with tops cut off. Opens with three siblings, insulated in a suburban house their entire lives, being taught fake vocabulary words (“a sea is a leather armchair with wooden arms”). Dad brings a female security guard called Christina from town to have dispassionate sex with the son. The girls kill time by playing fun games, like testing homemade anesthetics (“the one who wakes up first will be the winner”).

Everybody loves Christina:

The girl from outside brings new ideas, and the kids start to act differently, attacking each other with knives and hammers. An unknown creature (neighbor’s kitty) comes over the fence, and the boy defends his family using garden shears.

Dad finds out that one girl (none of the kids have names) got hollywood videos from security guard Christina and developed a killer Rocky impression. He punishes the guilty parties appropriately, beating his daughter with the videotape duct-taped to his hand, then nailing Christina with her VCR. “I hope your kids have bad influences and develop a bad personality. I wish this with all my heart as punishment for the evil you have caused my family.”

Rocky:

Dad tells them a person is ready to leave the house when their dogtooth comes out. Predictably, his daughter knocks out her own tooth, then hides in the trunk of his car to escape. The other daughter is having sex with her brother (if the kids are even related, and not kidnapped or something).

A Cannes winner and oscar nominee. The mom appeared in the other bizarro incestual Greek movie I’ve seen, Singapore Sling. The movie doesn’t explain much, goes in its own entertaining direction instead of trying to psychoanalyze and present backstory.

Lanthimos is one of Cinema Scope’s 50 Under 50, but I’ve avoided reading his entry because it contains possible spoilers about his follow-up, Alps.

Film Quarterly:

Dadaism delighted in exaggerating the pompous absurdity of the ceremonies that authority needs in order to legitimate itself, and Lanthimos’s anatomization of patriarchal power in Dogtooth partakes of the same spirit of coldly savage caricature. The father in the film is not the underside of the Law so much as its parodic extension.