I’d be lying if I said I was entirely clear as to who is playing what role throughout the film (in particular, the nurse’s relationship with her live-in father – if it is her father – blurs identity lines). Yet in essence this idea of identity confusion is central to the film. It’s partly why obscured vision is a recurring motif, from Lanthimos’ habit of avoiding his characters’ faces to the repeated sight of the nurse administering her father’s eye drops. As the nurse and her fellow Alps are forced to slip from one identity to another on demand, the movie becomes a commentary on the ways we often treat the people in our lives as actors to be directed. We may not give them exact lines or pieces of wardrobe, as happens here, but we expect specific behavior – and we turn on them when they go off script...
Read the rest of the review at Larsen on Film.
