Arcadia (Yorgos Zois, 2024) (Patreon)

Maximum big surprise? 

No, not exactly, but Arcadia is watchable enough, given that Zois lays out a number of worthy gimmicks and follows them where they'd logically go. If you ever plan on seeing this film (which I'd have bet the farm would end up in ND/NF, but what do I know), then you might want to check out here.

[SPOILERS FOLLOW]

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The various reviews that has characterized Arcadia as "Greek Weird Wave does The Sixth Sense" are fairly reductive, but not altogether wrong. To his credit, Zois makes his primary conceit evident within the first ten minutes. The living and the dead exist side by side in this film, and every dead person is stuck in this interpersonal limbo because they are attached to someone who refuses to let them go. This unfinished business takes a number of forms, including a lifelong vendetta, a woman who won't stop looking for her (dead) birth mother, or in the most poignant example, a kindly policeman (Vagelis Evangelinos) who lost his best friend, a police dog.

A lot of these marginal characters are much more interesting than the wet blanket couple at the center of Arcadia. Yannis (Vangelis Mourikis) is a former doctor whose wife Katerina (Angeliki Papoulia), a neurologist, crashed her car and died while on a clandestine getaway with her lover Petros (Nikolas Papagiannis). Katerina is stuck with Yannis as he trudges around the hillside town where she and Petros died, but she is introduced to a nighttime culture of stranded spirits, who drink, dance, and have orgies at the local bar, Arcadia.

Zois has two signature moves in Arcadia, and while one of them works pretty damn well, the other almost tanks it. First the bad news: in more than half the shots in the film, Zois either starts with a wide master and slooooowly zooms in, or begins in close-up and slooooowly zooms out. I see this all the time now (How to Have Sex was the last offender), and I'm guessing these are phony digital zooms that are done in post-production. The effect almost never delivers the intended gravity, usually looking like a Walmart version of Tarkovsky. Indeed, the endless use of this maneuver in Arcadia gives the impression that Zois may be a writer who doesn't really know how to direct. (This is only his second feature, following 2015's Interruption.)

Now the good news. Zois' other primary technique has to do evolving lore regarding the rules of the earthbound dead. Most often, he plants some off-kilter detail, only to reveal later that it has to do with the unavoidable requirements of ghosts. For example, until your loved one relinquishes you and you're allowed to move on, you are stuck walking around in the shoes you were wearing when you died. There's no logic for this, but Arcadia commits to it, and a number of other examples, so that much of the film's communication happens through these visual signposts, rather than dialogue or exposition.

At its best, Arcadia feels a bit like a somber Lanthimos film based on a Charlie Kaufman script. But that's only at its best; often it is a bit of a slog, since certain emotional catharses are obviously on the way, and we're left waiting for them to happen so we, and the ghost, can depart. And while I appreciate the sexual frankness of Arcadia, it's also a bit cheap, an example of a conceit that could have been anything, but offers a diegetic reason to watch Papoulia masturbate. Still, Arcadia has a few bright ideas that suggest that Zois might have a bright future ahead. He just needs to develop his own creative voice.