Criminal undercurrents in a sleepy Greek backwater provide the pretext for a disquieting spectacle of strangeness

A drumbeat of anxiety and impending violence thuds insistently from this opaque, disquieting spectacle from Greek film-maker Syllas Tzoumerkas – who has previously directed challenging films such as Homeland (2010) and A Blast (2014) and was screenwriter on the excellent male-midlife breakdown satire Suntan (2016).

Tzoumerkas’s movie goes out on a creaking limb of weirdness. It’s a bizarre, occasionally almost Lynchian film, alienated and alienating, interspersed – initially, at any rate – with dream-visions of biblical scenes in the burning sun. Its borderline preposterous narrative may simply be the pretext for its tableau of strangeness and bacchanal of dysfunction.