We first meet our unnamed hero as he is slowly, methodically, banging his head against a wall. Clearly this is painful, but for him, just not painful enough.
IMDB
An eerie epidemic is sweeping Athens. It has none of the sound and fury of Covid-19 - the film was shot before the pandemic - but it is upturning the city all the same. One man, Aris (Aris Servertalis) falls sick on the bus. He is woken at the end of the line and asked where he’d intended to get off. He can’t remember. He is asked where he lives. He can’t remember that either. When he admits that he doesn’t know his own name, he is ferried off in an ambulance and handed over to the Disturbed Memory Department of a hospital, where he meets amiable doctors and other unfortunates struck by the same amnesia.
Apples: A memorably weird Greek fable about amnesia
Bleak, deceptively rich comedy about what happens when identity is stripped away
Genre: Drama
In a recent interview Christos Nikou sought to put some distance between his debut feature and emanations of the Greek “weird wave” such as Yorgos Lanthimos’s Dogtooth and Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Attenberg. One thinks of those heavy metal bands that used to occasionally argue that they were only obliquely connected to the genre. “Iron Axe are really more of a hard blues outfit.” That sort of thing.
It must be irritating to suffer automatic filing into the nearest convenient box, but anyone familiar with those films – even those unaware that Nikou worked as script supervisor on Dogtooth – will immediately detect the linking tendrils. Once again, we are in a world that has been skewed significantly towards the weird. The humour is chilled down to absolute zero. The over-riding pessimism can’t entirely blank out the beli
Aris Servetalis in Christos Nikou s unsettling directorial debut, Apples
Credit: Bartosz Swiniarski
Dir: Christos Nikou. Starring: Aris Servetalis, Sofia Georgovassili, Anna Kalaitzidou, Argyris Bakirtzis, Kostas Laskos. 12A cert, 91 mins
“The Greek Weird Wave” is the favoured catch-all term for the country’s arthouse offerings, thanks to a series of films that apply a zonked aesthetic to their far-out conceits. In the process, humanity is usually made to look lost and sad. It all started with Dogtooth (2009), about a psychotic form of home schooling, which was deeply funny and traumatically disturbing – from there, the feted career of Yorgos Lanthimos (The Lobster, The Favourite) sprang.
As a pandemic of amnesia hits Greece, forcing forgotten souls to reconstruct their identities, we wonder whether one man just wants the chance to start again.