‘Dogtooth’ Director Assembling ‘Alps,’ A Darker, More Extreme New Film
By Russ Fischer/March 9, 2011 9:00 am EST
Dogtooth has been a surprising film over the past year, first shocking audiences at Cannes with a depiction of a family whose dysfunction is more whacked-out than most would think possible, and then blindsiding awards prognosticators when it nabbed a Best Foreighn Language Film Oscar nomination.
Now director Yorgos Lanthimos is already in post-production on his follow-up film. Called Alps, the movie is likely to hit Cannes, and the director says it makes Dogtooth look like a kids’ film. Uh-oh. The LA Times says the film “centers on a group of people who agree to stand in for others’ lost loved ones , replicating their behavior and gestures to help with the mourners’ grieving.” OK, not a stretch to see how that idea could take a group of characters to some very dark, uncomfortable places. Imagine the outpouring not only of grief, but of long-buried negative feelings, that might erupt when a person wounded by grief has a chance to role-play a last encounter with the departed. Turns out the director had talked about the film to The Playlist last year, saying
It’s mainly about death and substitution in a way. If you can substitute people that have died with other people and how difficult that can be. It involves the stories of many people, and I guess it has similarities with Dogtooth in its tone, because it’s quite dark as well, but is also funny and violet. It’s contradictory, like Dogtooth is.
The director said today, “[Alps] is darker and funnier. It goes to each extreme a little bit more.” And that’s the thing that worries me just a bit. Dark and extreme is fine; self-consciously dark and extreme is something that feels really false and often can be spotted a mile away. If Alps is organically a really perverse movie, then so be it. That’s all I ask, that the material is driving the darkness, rather than the other way around. Either way, my curiosity is quite piqued.
‘Dogtooth’ Director Assembling ‘Alps,’ A Darker, More Extreme New Film
By Russ Fischer/March 9, 2011 9:00 am EST
Dogtooth has been a surprising film over the past year, first shocking audiences at Cannes with a depiction of a family whose dysfunction is more whacked-out than most would think possible, and then blindsiding awards prognosticators when it nabbed a Best Foreighn Language Film Oscar nomination.
Now director Yorgos Lanthimos is already in post-production on his follow-up film. Called Alps, the movie is likely to hit Cannes, and the director says it makes Dogtooth look like a kids’ film. Uh-oh. The LA Times says the film “centers on a group of people who agree to stand in for others’ lost loved ones , replicating their behavior and gestures to help with the mourners’ grieving.” OK, not a stretch to see how that idea could take a group of characters to some very dark, uncomfortable places. Imagine the outpouring not only of grief, but of long-buried negative feelings, that might erupt when a person wounded by grief has a chance to role-play a last encounter with the departed. Turns out the director had talked about the film to The Playlist last year, saying
It’s mainly about death and substitution in a way. If you can substitute people that have died with other people and how difficult that can be. It involves the stories of many people, and I guess it has similarities with Dogtooth in its tone, because it’s quite dark as well, but is also funny and violet. It’s contradictory, like Dogtooth is.
The director said today, “[Alps] is darker and funnier. It goes to each extreme a little bit more.” And that’s the thing that worries me just a bit. Dark and extreme is fine; self-consciously dark and extreme is something that feels really false and often can be spotted a mile away. If Alps is organically a really perverse movie, then so be it. That’s all I ask, that the material is driving the darkness, rather than the other way around. Either way, my curiosity is quite piqued.
Now director Yorgos Lanthimos is already in post-production on his follow-up film. Called Alps, the movie is likely to hit Cannes, and the director says it makes Dogtooth look like a kids’ film. Uh-oh.
The LA Times says the film “centers on a group of people who agree to stand in for others’ lost loved ones , replicating their behavior and gestures to help with the mourners’ grieving.”
OK, not a stretch to see how that idea could take a group of characters to some very dark, uncomfortable places. Imagine the outpouring not only of grief, but of long-buried negative feelings, that might erupt when a person wounded by grief has a chance to role-play a last encounter with the departed.
Turns out the director had talked about the film to The Playlist last year, saying
The director said today, “[Alps] is darker and funnier. It goes to each extreme a little bit more.”
It’s mainly about death and substitution in a way. If you can substitute people that have died with other people and how difficult that can be. It involves the stories of many people, and I guess it has similarities with Dogtooth in its tone, because it’s quite dark as well, but is also funny and violet. It’s contradictory, like Dogtooth is.
And that’s the thing that worries me just a bit. Dark and extreme is fine; self-consciously dark and extreme is something that feels really false and often can be spotted a mile away. If Alps is organically a really perverse movie, then so be it. That’s all I ask, that the material is driving the darkness, rather than the other way around. Either way, my curiosity is quite piqued.
