A thoughtful pandemic thriller with a dash of ‘Clockwork Orange’
Apples 12A cert, 91 min Dir Christos Nikou
Starring Aris Servetalis, Sofia Georgovassili, Anna Kalaitzidou, Argyris Bakirtzis, Kostas Laskos
‘The Greek Weird Wave” started with Dogtooth, Yorgos Lanthimos’s 2009 drama about a psychotic form of homeschooling. It was deeply funny and traumatically disturbing, and from that sprang the director’s feted career (The Lobster, The Favourite).
Lanthimos’s assistant director, Christos Nikou, now makes his debut with Apples, the story of a pandemic – conceived before Covid – that triggers total amnesia in its victims. This could have resulted in head-spinning science-fiction with bursts of Lanthimos-like surrealism, but Nikou ducks away from that. To think about memory loss, his film turns inwards in reflection, a choice that’s both touching and disquieting because the main character has no remaining past on which to reflect.
Even before the ailment strikes, this bearded loner (Aris Servetalis) has been mooching about in his unkempt apartment and beating his head on the wall in existential distress. He looks like a man who wants rid of his memories, whatever they might be. Somehow, the universe listens: on a night-bus home, he forgets his destination and name, and he’s ushered into medical care as the latest casualty of the plague.
The Disturbed Memory Department sets him tasks as rehab.
Only by getting back on a bike can he discover whether he’s forgotten how to ride it – though borrowing one from a child makes him cut a pitiable figure as he tries. The medics suggest he goes out, gets drunk and has a meaningless one-night stand; and also that he befriends a dying man, to reconnect with the emotion known as “grief ”. Because he’s meant to take Polaroid snaps of all this, the film swivels into satire of our every Instagrammable moment, with the twist that the doctors give his pictures only a cursory look.
Apples is set in a contemporary world that’s strikingly technology-free – there are no phones – and creepily depopulated. Strains of Scarborough Fair on the radio (“Remember me to one who lives there”) hint at the hero’s previous life, about which we otherwise learn little till the very end. His only sensory cue, discovered in hospital, is immediately loving the taste of apples, as if some part of the gustatory cortex had defied the general atrophy.
You can imagine Lanthimos going playfully to town here, even while drinking deep from melancholy. And there are hints in that prankish direction, as when a fellow amnesiac relates the plot of Titanic as something astonishingly new, or when a fancydress party’s guests seem oblivious to each other’s personae. But while occasionally too muted for its own good, Apples benefits from not pushing its quirk factor too hard – that would only have set up a barrier between us and Servetalis’s detachment.
It’s a braver choice for Nikou to invite our empathy. This man without a memory has forgotten how to feel, and there’s something Clockwork Orangelike about the tests to trigger him. When a fruit-seller remarks that apples have the known property of helping with memory loss, the comment stops him in his tracks. What he knows of memory is full of fear and pain; at least a blank slate is cloud-free. Perhaps it’s safer, he reckons, to switch to oranges.