Avis des critiques

A tale of epidemic memory loss, grief and possible new beginnings, it’s a deadpan tragicomedy that mixes the playful and the poignant in a manner as tasty as a spitter... As with his “Greek Weird Wave” compatriots Yorgos Lanthimos and Athina Rachel Tsangari, Nikou balances profundity with absurdism to striking effect.

An awful lot of blunt dramas directly about the COVID era are headed our way soon, but Nikou's oblique comedy of a world in bleary disarray hits a more tender spot than many of them will, dealing as it does with eternal crises of personal dissociation and social placelessness.

For those familiar with the work of Yorgos Lanthimos, [the film's] straight-faced shenanigans will be a dream come true... "Apples" suggests, with great pertinence, that pandemics create new normals and nothing is set in stone. That said, Nikou’s career seems like something we can bank on. Remember his name.

Mileage may vary based on your threshold for adults acting like children, and the pace is glacial, but "Apples" isn’t without its charms... It’s a tender but slight debut from Nikou, though certainly signals him as a filmmaker to keep an eye on.

While occasionally too muted for its own good, "Apples" does benefit from not pushing its quirk factor too hard – that would only have set up a barrier between us and Servetalis’s hollow detachment. It’s a braver choice for Nikou to invite our empathy.

"Apples" is intriguingly deadpan and sometimes funny, though I couldn’t help feeling that it is also contrived, and even a bit flippant in a middleweight-arthouse mode, not quite as profound as it thinks but certainly displaying some impressively choreographed mannerisms of dysfunction.

For all its misdirection and confusion, "Apples" reaches a conclusion of unexpected emotional weight. An intelligent and clear-sighted piece of filmmaking, it is a highly accomplished first directorial outing by Nikou.

Nikou satirises the banality of the human condition by reducing to a standardised bucket list the experiences (joining a protest, crashing a car, a one-night stand) that we imagine constitute our very individuality.

That "Apples" ends up strangely moving is down to Nikou’s deft handling of tone and an engaging performance from Servetalis, whose mono-expression makes Buster Keaton look like Jim Carrey. "Apples" is an offbeat treat that manages to embrace ironic distance and emotional weight through a prism of perfectly judged absurdism.

It's a moodily shot and sometimes eerily atmospheric film that frames forgetting as both a blessing and curse... Nikou's vision perhaps lacks the confidence and clarity of someone like Lanthimos, but the film's oddity and imagery is often very appealing, it's tied up surprisingly neatly, and for all its apparent affectation it feels very human at its core.

Nikou has fully worked out his central allegory... But the ostensible emotional core of the film is left frustratingly one-dimensional... Apples may be cleverly constructed, but for a film about the interplay of memory, identity, and grief, its rendering of all three of those things remains disappointingly vague.

"Apples" is a rather gentler addition to the Greek weird wave... Nikou’s film is also disappointingly literal compared to those pleasingly obtuse films from his fellow countrymen and women. Still, it's not without its wry pleasures.