91 min | NR | June 24, 2022 | Cohen Media Group
A man wakes on a bus with no memory during an amnesia pandemic, and the state hands him a tape recorder and a list of tasks to build a new self from scratch. Christos Nikou turns the gimmick into a deadpan study of grief and the people who would rather forget than feel. Eat your apples. They help.
Aris wakes on a bus with no idea who he is. He carries no wallet and no memory and no way home. An amnesia pandemic is sweeping the city, and the unclaimed patients enter a recovery program that builds new identities from scratch. Aris receives a tape recorder and a daily list of tasks to complete and photograph. Christos Nikou frames this as a deadpan parable about whether a self can be rebuilt from instructions, and the real subject is grief and the convenient escape that forgetting offers.
Aris Servetalis plays the title character with a flat affect that hides a man working very hard to feel nothing. He eats apples constantly because someone told him they help memory, and Servetalis turns that small habit into the film’s quiet engine of dread. Sofia Georgovassili plays Anna, another program patient who completes her own tasks with a willingness that Aris cannot match. Their scenes together stay muted and awkward, and Georgovassili lets warmth leak through the regimented small talk. The performances refuse catharsis and earn it anyway.
Nikou directs his first feature and co-writes with Stavros Raptis. He shoots in the boxy Academy ratio, and the square frame traps Aris inside compositions that leave dead space around him. The cinematography favors static medium shots and muted color, and the camera holds long after a normal cut would arrive. That patience forces the audience to sit inside Aris’s blankness rather than observe it. The tasks themselves, recorded on Polaroids, become a stack of evidence that a life lived by instruction is not the same as a life remembered.
The film withholds explanation about the pandemic and never apologizes for it. Nikou understands that the mechanism matters less than the choice it presents. Aris can do the work of reconstructing a self, or he can let the diagnosis absolve him of a past he would rather not carry. The closing stretch reframes everything that came before, and the parable lands because Nikou trusts silence and an apple to carry the weight.