Alps (film)

The film centers on a night nurse in a hospital who provides special services to families who have recently lost their loved ones. The nurse is a member of a group called the Alps, whose members offer, for a fee, to play recently deceased during visits of their grieving relatives.

• Aris Servetalis as Ambulance Man
• Angeliki Papoulia as Nurse
• Ariane Labed as Gymnast
• Efthymis Filippou as Lighting shop owner

Yorgos Lanthimos and Efthymis Filippou developed the premise for the film out of the idea of people who allege something which is fabricated, for example via prank calls or by announcing their own deaths. The story took form as they needed a setting which could work well cinematically. Lanthimos considers it the complete opposite of his previous film, Dogtooth, which he says "is the story of a person who tries to escape a fictitious world. Alps is about a person who tries to enter a fabricated world."[2]

The film was produced by Tsangari's production company Haos Film, which had previously produced Lanthimos' 2005 film Kinetta. The budget included funding from the Greek Film Center.[3] Filming started in October 2010.[4] Some scenes were added on the set and parts of the dialogue were improvised by the actors.[2]

The film premiered on 3 September 2011 in competition at the 68th Venice International Film Festival.[5] Lee Marshall of Screen Daily started by comparing Alps to the director's last film. He called it "a sort of Dogtooth 2", and wrote that "the cultured urban audiences turned on by the sheer kookiness of that film may feel a slight sense of déjà vu here." On the film in its own right, Marshall wrote: "Hollywood might have fashioned a weepie or a thriller out of the same material - and there are echoes here of some of Hitchcock's fascination with surrogates, from the Roger Thornhill/George Kaplan of North by Northwest to the Madeleine/Carlotta of Vertigo. But Alps is so intriguing because of what it refuses to explain. ... It's also a film which manages to juggle absurdist comedy with bleak tragedy, a yearning desire for human warmth with outbreaks of sudden violence, all the while maintaining an impressive control of tone."[6]

• Alps on IMDb
• Alps at AllMovie
• myFILM.gr
• News story on Alps
• Alps at Rotten Tomatoes
• Alps at Metacritic