General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Alps (2011 film)

Alps (Greek: Άλπεις, Alpeis) is a 2011 Greek drama film directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, in which a secret four-person group hires itself out to impersonate the recently dead for their grieving relatives and friends. Written by Lanthimos with Efthimis Filippou, it premiered in competition at the 2011 Venice Film Festival, where it won the Golden Osella for Best Screenplay.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director and writers	Yorgos Lanthimos; screenplay by Lanthimos and Efthimis Filippou²
Year, country, language	2011; Greece and France; Greek²^•³
Running time	93 minutes³
Premise	A nurse, a paramedic, a gymnast and her coach form a company called Alps that stands in for dead people, hired by relatives, friends or colleagues of the deceased; the leader, the paramedic, calls himself Mont Blanc²
Principal cast	Angeliki Papoulia, Aris Servetalis, Ariane Labed, Johnny Vekris, Stavros Psyllakis⁴
Producers	Yorgos Lanthimos and Athina Rachel Tsangari; a Haos Film production co-produced with Marni Films¹^•³
Major award	Golden Osella for Best Screenplay, Venice Film Festival 2011; also nominated for the Golden Lion¹
Greek release	27 October 2011²

Spoilers

Plot and premise

The film's central device is a service for hire. A nurse, a paramedic, a gymnast and her coach form a company they call Alps, whose members stand in for dead people by appointment, hired by the relatives, friends or colleagues of the deceased.² For a fee they act the part of the missing family member, learning the person's hobbies and eccentricities to help the customer accept the loss; the distributor Kino Lorber's synopsis compares the arrangement to methadone as a substitute for heroin addiction.⁴ The substitutes do not take every offer: the rules require that they maintain emotional distance and neither identify with the deceased nor draw inspiration from their past lives, and the roles are researched, rehearsed and performed in minute detail.⁵^•¹³

The company operates illegally under a strict discipline regime imposed by its leader, the paramedic, who has reserved for himself alone the code name of the Alps' great pinnacle, Mont Blanc.⁵ Members are forbidden to discuss their activities with non-members.³ The nurse, known as Monte Rosa, does not obey these rules: she takes on a client of her own, controls the rules of that performance and keeps the financial benefits, and becomes emotionally involved with one of her subjects.¹^•⁶ When the leader discovers this, he beats her with a club and expels her from the group, and the project spirals into violence and confusion.⁶^•⁴

Style and interpretation

As in Lanthimos's earlier films, the characters speak in a monotone. In Alps this flat delivery acquires a specific function: whether a character is playing a role or not, they speak the same way, so that as the film progresses it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish performance from reality within the film's world.⁶ The International Film Festival Rotterdam program notes that everyone is always playing a role, a principle taken to its extreme here, and describes the film as commentary on Greek society in particular and human shortcomings in general.³

French critics grouped the film with the austere, absurdist manner of the new Greek cinema. Les Inrockuptibles suggested reading it as a deranged documentary on the condition of actors, while Cahiers du Cinéma called it an opaque, icy enigma of long static shots; AlloCiné's normalized press average was 3.2 out of 5 across 18 reviews.⁷

Production

The film was produced by Lanthimos and Athina Rachel Tsangari, the Greek filmmaker who had produced Lanthimos's Kinetta (2005) and been an associate producer on his Oscar-nominated Dogtooth (2009), through her Athens-based company Haos Film, in co-production with Marni Films.¹^•⁸ Cinematography is by Christos Voudouris and editing by Yorgos Mavropsaridis; the film was shot on 35 mm.³ Angeliki Papoulia, who plays Monte Rosa, had also appeared in Dogtooth as the older daughter.⁴^•⁹

Release and reception

Alps premiered in official competition at the 2011 Venice Film Festival and screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, AFI FEST, the Busan and Reykjavik festivals in 2011, and the Rotterdam and Sydney festivals in 2012.¹^•¹⁰^•⁵ It was released in Greece on 27 October 2011, followed by Sweden, the Netherlands, Spain, Germany, Denmark, Poland, the United Kingdom, Belgium and France during 2012 and 2013, and Italy in December 2016.²

Beyond the Venice screenplay award and Golden Lion nomination, the film's festival record includes the Sydney Film Prize at the Sydney Film Festival 2012, a Special Jury Prize for narrative feature for Lanthimos at the Sarasota Film Festival 2012, a Special Mention for Ariane Labed in the Balkan competition at the Sofia International Film Festival 2012, and nominations at the Black Movie, Chlotrudis and International Cinephile Society awards.¹^•⁵

Context in Greek cinema

Alps belongs to the group of festival-oriented Greek films, alongside Attenberg (2010) and others, that came to international attention after Dogtooth won the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes in 2009 and earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film.¹¹ International critics dubbed this body of work, including Dogtooth, Attenberg and Alps, the "weird wave," and it was frequently read as a response to the Greek economic crisis that began in 2009; Greek film scholars have observed that the connection between the label and the crisis is tenuous and a coincidence of timing, and the filmmakers themselves do not accept the idea of a movement.¹²

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026