The characters in Apples exist in a state somewhere between awareness and stasis. This is understandable, given that the world of co-writer/director Christos Nikou’s film has been stricken with a pandemic of sudden-onset amnesia, with its victims and sufferers liable to show symptoms at any given moment and in any situation. We see an example of this phenomenon among a group of people in costume (either attending a convention or headed to a Halloween party, or perhaps both). A man dressed up as a certain caped crusader is being led away by medical professionals in an emergency services van, leaving some befuddled faces, including one dressed up as the hero’s feline frenemy, behind.
It is a short but truly absurd scene within the context of this very absurd film, which similarly exists in a state between morbidly funny and deadly sincere. Nikou and co-screenwriter Stavros Raptis are not quite able to nail this mix of tones and treatments, although the film comes close at times to matching its own ideal. The obvious influence here is the same creative intentions that led Yorgos Lanthimos to success with early titles like Dogtooth whose idiosyncrasies are meant to unsettle the audience. Here, though, the overextended metaphors aren’t driven by something deeper.
The weirdness doesn’t stop with the concept, by the way. We follow a single person suffering the barely explained, never-named illness. Aris (Aris Servetalis) (which means the character might have a different name, for all we know), is afflicted while napping on a bus, awakening only when the driver prompts him. Immediately delivered to the authorities when he cannot identify himself, he’s brought to a medical facility and set up with a roommate, a pair of social workers/doctors (Anna Kalaitzidou and Argyris Bakirtzis) and a sort of intricate lesson plan, presumably meant to coax the details of his past back into his present.
The assignment ahead of him is a sort of extended litmus test to see if he can function in society long after crafting a new identity for himself. Aris goes to the movies, where he sees a horror film about a chainsaw massacre and meets Anna (Sofia Georgovassili), a fellow troubled participant in the program. She is perennially cheerful, a counterpoint to his bemused and sulky detachment, unless that’s the difference between the actors playing these roles in such a strangely limited atmosphere. Anyway, Aris rides a bike, drives a car, goes to a strip club and generally does the things adults do, all with a strategic blankness that never quite allows us inside this character’s headspace.
That, ultimately, is the problem with Apples, which borrows its title from the only thing the protagonist remembers about himself after the disease has settled upon him. He remembers that he must have liked eating apples; his roommate at the center cannot recall if he did, and so he allows Aris to eat all the ones on his dinner plate. It is an evocative and provocative idea, this obvious allegory of disease (the film seems to have been shot before the pandemic, giving it a strange resonance) and the loneliness that isolation caused. But by distancing the audience from its characters, the film falls regrettably short.
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