Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
Year Released: 2011
Rating: 1.0
A group of individuals - of perplexing backgrounds (gymnasts!?) - decide to offer a service in which they dress up and 'replace' the recently deceased and 'play' the part of the lost loved one for family members, lovers and friends. This essentially betrays any kind of real-world psychology - How would you go about offering this kind of role-playing? Advertise in the newspaper? Who would actually want someone to do replace the recently deceased? Who would want to 'play' someone who is recently deceased? - and comes across as aggravatingly dumb the longer it goes on, and without actual 'characters' developed in a traditional fashion, is sketchily designed as a movie. With Dogtooth - which it's impossible not to compare this to - Lanthimos did an impressive job balancing absurdity with black humor, while the black humor is all but non-existent in this (though I admit to laughing when one of the characters tries to play tennis with a dying girl in a hospital bed) ... leaving a slew of unlikely, disconnected and unrewarding scenes.
