Before The Lobster made dead-eyed dystopia sexy and The Favourite taught us that powdered wigs pair nicely with passive aggression, Yorgos Lanthimos directed Alps—a movie so emotionally detached it feels like it was filmed in a morgue and written by a committee of sociopaths learning about human behavior via IKEA manuals.
Alps asks a very specific question: “What if strangers could help you grieve by impersonating your dead loved ones with all the warmth and nuance of a DMV employee during a systems outage?” Then it answers that question by spending 90 minutes making you deeply uncomfortable and vaguely angry—because the only thing worse than watching characters refuse to emote is being told it’s brilliant.
Let’s start with the premise. A group of emotionally bankrupt individuals form a clandestine business where they pretend to be recently deceased people for the grieving. Grandma died? Cool, here’s a grown man who looks like he eats wallpaper playing cards with you and calling you “sweetie” in a tone that would make HAL 9000 blush. Lost your wife? Don’t worry—she’s now being played by a nurse who reads from a script like she’s being held hostage during a table read.
They call themselves the Alps, presumably because “The Void” was already taken by a Scandinavian death metal band. The group is led by a paramedic (Aris Servetalis) who insists on being referred to as “Mont Blanc,” because nothing helps process grief like code names stolen from a North Face catalog. His co-conspirators include a nurse (Aggeliki Papoulia), a gymnast with all the charisma of a houseplant, and the gymnast’s coach, who seems to hate everyone, including himself.
Now, this could have been a poignant satire. A surreal exploration of grief, identity, and the emotional fragmentation of modern society. But Lanthimos doesn’t want you to feel things—he wants you to notice that you’re not feeling things and then stare into the void like a dog trying to understand algebra.
Everything is delivered with robotic detachment. Lines are spoken with all the passion of someone reading off an eye chart. Interactions are sterile, antiseptic, and deliberately jarring. Watching Alps is like watching aliens cosplay as humans after reading one too many Samuel Beckett plays and deciding empathy is a bourgeois hobby.
Aggeliki Papoulia, who previously starred in Dogtooth, plays the nurse as a woman slowly unraveling, but with such muted expression it’s like watching drywall experience a nervous breakdown. She begins taking her roles too seriously, showing up uninvited, inserting herself into families’ lives, and generally acting like the world’s most committed improv actor with zero audience feedback.
There’s a subplot involving the gymnast that somehow manages to make both sports and human suffering boring. She wants to use pop music in her routine, but her coach insists she’s not “mature enough” to handle Nina Simone. That’s right—one of the emotional climaxes of this film hinges on Nina Simone song rights. It’s like Black Swan without the feathers, stakes, or interest.
The cinematography is classic Lanthimos: claustrophobic, voyeuristic, and slightly nauseating. Characters are often filmed from behind, partially obstructed, or through glass, as if the camera itself is too embarrassed to be there. The lighting is fluorescent and unforgiving, bathing everything in the kind of sickly glow usually reserved for hospital waiting rooms and government buildings that haven’t updated their fixtures since the Cold War.
Dialogue is sparse and emotionally neutered. If you’re hoping for revelations, confessions, or even the occasional basic human expression, abandon hope now. Every scene unfolds like a therapy session conducted by fax machine. People speak in stilted phrases, glance blankly into the middle distance, and respond to tragedy with all the urgency of someone choosing between lentil soup and minestrone.
And yet, Lanthimos insists this is a movie about grief. But grief here is stripped of chaos, irrationality, or real sorrow. Instead, it’s dissected, cataloged, and repackaged by people who seem to have never felt anything more intense than static cling. If this is grief, it’s grief for androids.
The film’s pacing is glacial. Scenes stretch on like chewing gum stuck to the bottom of a philosophical shoe. There are moments where nothing happens, and not in a meaningful nothingness kind of way—just literal nothingness. Long takes of people sitting. Walking. Folding things. Rehearsing meaningless conversations. At one point, I swear I watched a man clean his glasses for forty-five seconds and felt more emotional connection with the lenses than any human on screen.
The score is practically nonexistent. When it does appear, it’s either grating or so subtle you wonder if your speakers are malfunctioning. Combined with the sterile visuals and anti-dialogue, it creates an atmosphere of profound unease—like someone injected existential dread directly into your corneas.
And then, just when you think the film might crescendo into something—anything—it just sort of ends. Not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with a vague, unresolved shrug. No catharsis. No revelation. Just more blank stares, more forced impersonations, and the unsettling realization that you’ve spent an hour and a half watching people cosplay sadness with all the finesse of a community theater production of The Twilight Zone.
Final Verdict? Alps is a film that mistakes emotional constipation for artistic brilliance. It wants to explore grief, but instead feels like it was written by someone who read a Wikipedia article on mourning and decided the real tragedy was people having facial expressions. It’s hollow, meandering, and about as emotionally satisfying as hugging a wax figure of your grandmother.
Watch it if you’re a diehard Lanthimos completist, a fan of avant-garde emotional torture, or someone who wants to spend 93 minutes questioning whether you, too, are dead inside. Everyone else? Skip Alps and go rewatch Dogtooth. At least when those people were weird, they committed to it.
