Two men and two women call their unusual service company, which looks like a secret society, “The Alps”. They offer themselves as placeholders to those who miss another person. As a stand-in who, in re-enacted scenes, marks rather than plays the permanently absent person. The substitute actions seem wooden and those who perform them look like bad copies. This actually makes the loss of the original all the clearer and the pain all the more palpable. But everyone, the service providers as well as the employees, seem to be trapped in an ultimately self-centered longing for the satisfaction of their own needs, which makes honest contact, genuine warmth and true tenderness impossible. Until one of them breaks away...
Alpeis is a no less enigmatic and oppressive film than its predecessor, Kynodontas, with which Yorgos Lanthimos, born in 1973, presented one of the key films of the new Greek cinema in 2009. Kynodontas depicts an experiment in isolation - three adolescent siblings are kept away from the world by their parents in a villa with a garden - which ultimately goes horribly wrong. This time the experiment takes place in the middle of society, and this time too it goes wrong: the attempt to provide comfort and compassion fails because of the power imbalance that separates men and women. Fails because of the refusal to let go of the dead. Fails because of resistance to further development.
