Two years after his international hit «Kynodontas», Yorgos Lanthimos released «Alpeis», which is as good as the previous, winning the Best Screenplay award at the Venezia film festival, as well as other distinctions in Sydney and Sofia. However the film was unjustly appreciated: as people say, "comparisons are unfair" and the reception of «Alpeis» proves it, as audiences and film critics were expecting another portrait of canine confinement. This time the filmmaker opted for theatricality, games of appearance and perception, he opted for a tale that fluctuates between drama and comedy, inclined to the absurdist aspects in the representation of reality. «Alpeis» is more realistic than its predecessor, but not because of this it lacks images expressing "artistic flights". On the other hand, Lanthimos touches death, a subject that frequently frightens people, when it is one of the few things we humans can have for sure. The story though does not present descriptions of demises, but a group called "Alpeis" that offers a peculiar service to mourners: a temporary substitute for the deceased, with a fixed fee, while the grievers adapt to the loss of their loved ones. Their varied clientèle includes the parents of a young tennis player, a blind and cuckolded old lady, a local man that communicates in English, a naval officer
At the same time the same personnel conforms a small group of gymnasts and trainers that gather in a sports hall. However the plot is built around a young nurse (played by splendid Angeliki Papoulia, who was the older sister in «Kynodontas»), her tribulations and twisting. The social and economic crisis of the country does not have a central place in Yorgos Lanthimos' cinema, as in the movies of other of his compatriots, but for the stories he tells Lanthimos vividly suggests that something is rotten in the state of Greece.
