Yorgos Lanthimos Focus: Alps

Following his multi-award-winning Dogtooth comes another beguilingly strange excursion into the outer reaches of social values from Greek writer/director Yorgos Lanthimos. His subject here is a shadowy quartet named after various alpine peaks who are hired to impersonate the recently deceased in order to ease the grieving of their bereaved families.

With his characteristic ability to make the bizarre appear languidly routine and then infuse it with the darkest humour, Lanthimos chronicles how the strictly maintained discipline of the Alps is threatened when Mount Rosa (Aggeliki Papoulia, the troubled older daughter in Dogtooth) does a little business on the side by pretending to be a young tennis star killed in a car accident. The barriers between awkward fantasy and cruel reality then quickly melt away, with unexpectedly harsh, though highly affecting, consequences.

Alps, dir. Yorgos Lanthimos, Greece 2011, 94 mins, Greek with English subtitles.