Yorgos Lanthimos’s breakthrough third feature, 2009’s Dogtooth, was a strikingly weird cult hit. With its darkly ingenious concept, its icy, unblinking style and its peculiar sense of humour, it not only became an arthouse favourite but was also nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Dogtooth bore traces of the work of fellow European auteurs like Michael Haneke another creator of coolly provocative, disturbing examinations of the family unit but was powerful and unique enough to distinguish Lanthimos as a major filmmaker with his own mark to make.
Last year Lanthimos returned to cinemas with Alps. The plot’ (such as it is Lanthimos’s elliptical, cruelly playful approach rarely qualifies as straightforward storytelling) concerns an organisation known, for reasons (sort of) explained in the film, as Alps’. Its agents act as stand-ins for recently deceased people, apparently to assist their loved ones in the grieving process.
Though Alps is a slightly tougher nut to crack than Dogtooth, requiring even more patience than did the earlier film, it is instantly recognisable from the strange, clinical opening shot as the work of the same director. This impressively demonstrates the distinctiveness of Lanthimos’s approach, but it also proves stifling: the trouble is, the film is so reminiscent of its predecessor that it risks becoming an exercise in self-parody.
Over Alps’s 90-odd minutes, Lanthimos revisits Dogtooth’s strained social, familial and sexual relations, again shooting in long, uncomfortable sequences, eliciting deliberately disengaged performances from his actors and keeping his audience guessing for as long as possible. Ironically, by so forcefully demonstrating an auteur sensibility across the two films, Lanthimos ends up flirting with formulaism. In this way, Alps sets itself up to pale by comparison with the beloved earlier film.
A further problem is that Alps’s central conceit is simply not as morbidly fascinating as was Dogtooth’s. That film’s plausibility (it was disturbingly similar to certain real-life events) is absent here; what’s left is a string of scenes that feel preposterous and, therefore, hollow. One can’t help imagining how the concept might have fared had it instead been played for laughs as a Charlie Brooker / Chris Morris TV special, or perhaps even as a particularly ballsy Hollywood comedy. Lanthimos, of course, largely refuses both laugh-out-loud hilarity and moments of cathartic rage, and by the film’s end one is left questioning what has been gained by this restraint.
Overall Verdict: Another chilly portrayal of highly dysfunctional family life from Lanthimos. Has he fallen prey to the law of diminishing returns? He’s still one to watch – perhaps all will become clear with his next film.
Special Features:
Interview with Yorgos Lanthimos
Theatrical Trailer
Reviewer: Tom René