Film review: In Apples' absurdist pandemic future, Athens residents are infected with amnesia
Greek filmmaker Christos Nikou’s deadpan dystopia hits the screen at VIFF Centre
Absurd scenes abound in Apples.
Apples screens from July 8 to 14 at VIFF Centre
SHOT JUST BEFORE COVID TIMES, Greek filmmaker Christos Nikou’s tale of a mysterious pandemic that turns people into amnesiacs feels eerily prescient.
But it’s not just Apples’ subject matter. It’s the tone—the disconnect, the absurdity, the hollowness, and the isolation, all applying perfectly to life and society over the past two years.
The film opens with the sound of a bam-bam rhythm that turns out to be our inscrutable antihero Aris (Aris Servetalis) banging his head against a wall. He exits his apartment to a world in chaos, walking by a stranger who sits confused on a curb, his car pulled over haphazardly. The man has suddenly forgotten who he is.
Aris will soon become infected, too, awaking disoriented at the end of a busline. He’s carted off to the Disturbed Memory Department of an Athens medical facility.
With no family to claim him, he’s led into a medical program where doctors have a novel way of constructing a new identity. They send Aris home to a new apartment with an old-school tape recorder, over which they direct him to try out specific experiences—riding a bike, leaping off a diving board, having sex in a bar bathroom. Aris has to document each one via Polaroids that he slides into an equally retro photo album. (Is Nikou commenting on society’s obsessive identity-building on social media, or asking larger questions about whether our memories define who we are?)
There’s an intentional dry monotony to the way Aris goes about creating these “memories”, but there’s a lot of style to the way Nikou shoots it all, too. That’s no doubt in part due to Nikou’s cred in the Greek Weird Wave scene—specifically as Yorgos Lanthimos’s assistant director on the latter’s ultra-provocative Dogtooth. Nikou also borrows a lot of the dark, deadpan humour from Lanthimos’s work, too.
But Nikou has a visual signature all his own, and not just in his love of all things analog. One extended scene finds Aris attending a warehouse costume rave in an astronaut suit, stepping through tangles of tinsel and witnessing an ambulance whisk an amnesiac Batman away. It unfolds like a hallucination happening at an oddly clinical remove. And the director shows an assured use of visual motifs, especially in the titular apples that Aris lovingly picks out, peels, and savours.
Sometimes it feels like the full meaning of Apples might be lost in translation. As the story progresses, it feels increasingly distant and existential—a bit like Beckett, if he’d grown up amid Athens’ institutional buildings, late-night dance bars, and desolate city parks shown here.
But it turns out that growing emptiness makes Apples’ moving denouement all the more rewarding. This strange little film ends up tackling big ideas around forgetting, loss, and memory. It has a lyrical poignancy and profound, gentle humanity that you don’t expect. Especially from a Weird Waver.
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