Alps

Alps

The movie “Alps” is extremely weird, and it’s based on a premise that stretches credibility. It takes itself deadly seriously, but for all its parable-like qualities, I still can’t figure out what it’s supposed to mean. However, I have to say that the weirdness was kind of mesmerizing.

Picture a small band of therapists who call themselves “The Alps.” They’ve been named by their leader, who says that he has no idea what the title means. Their job is to hire themselves out to people who have recently lost loved ones. They pretend to be those dead people in order to console the bereaved. They don’t necessarily look like them or sound like them; they just stand in for them a few hours each week and recite memorized dialogue that one assumes has been provided by the survivors.

Absurd enough? Yet people hire them as if it made sense and participate in this therapy as if it would help. Not once does anyone in the movie point out how ridiculous its premise is. We don’t get to know the clients very well, but we watch the Alps members practice in an empty gymnasium. Mostly we follow a gymnast (Ariane Labed) and her coach (Johnny Vekris), working on a routine involving her dancing with a long ribbon attached to the end of her baton.

She does this beautifully to classical music, but when she wants to switch to pop he tells her he’ll smash her face in if she questions his authority. And it’s not an empty threat; he means it. This brutal relationship seems utterly disconnected from anything having to do with grief therapy or even anything else done by the Alps except for learning lines.

Early on, a young tennis player (Maria Kirozi) is gravely injured in a car accident, and we find out that the paramedic is something like an agent who seeks out potential customers for Alps. Team member Monte Rosa (Aggeliki Papoulia) calls dibs on the tennis player; later she lies to the other Alps about her recovery, then takes on the parents as private clients.

What she does in this role tends to confirm an earlier hint, which is that being an Alps member and doing the job requires a certain level of mental unbalance and can cause therapists to lose control of themselves because of the tension between who they are and what they’re supposed to do.

Giorgos Lanthimos directed “Alps,” which follows his “Dogtooth” from 2009. That was the movie where control-freak parents keep their kids confined within a walled garden and further cut them off from the world by teaching them incorrect words for things. A Lanthimos film is like a biological experiment, in which activity depends on what’s been placed into contact with what.

Though it’s provocative and demanding, “Alps” is also so self-enclosed that it lacks any emotional payoff. There isn’t a bigger world outside against which to measure it. When mourners are comforted by therapists who propose to stand in for their loved ones, you’d think something deeper might be stirred up. But “Alps” leaves you cold.

Watch Alps For Free On Gomovies.