Alps

Alps (Άλπεις, 2011) is a Greek drama by Yorgos Lanthimos — watch it online on iFILM. Four people — a nurse, a paramedic, a gymnast, and her coach — run a quiet side business: for a fee, they step into the lives of the recently dead. They visit grieving families, speak in the deceased's voice, inhabit their habits. It is a service. It has rules.

Aggeliki Papoulia plays the nurse, and the film tracks what happens when she starts blurring the assignment with something private. She keeps showing up. She stops taking instruction. The logic of the group's code, which seemed arbitrary to begin with, now shows its teeth.

Shot a year before Dogtooth made Lanthimos a festival name and three years before The Lobster, this has the same flat emotional register and the same air of systems taken completely seriously by everyone in them. There is no ironic wink at the audience. Stream Alps (2011) on iFILM.