Even without the “Welcome to Marathon” flyer that greets Katerina (Angeliki Papoulia) and Yannis (Vangelis Mourikis) upon their arrival in “Arcadia,” it’s clear that they’ve entered one of Greece’s stranger corners: a resort town where they will look into the untimely death of a loved one. An unnerving and curious meditation on grief, Yorgos Zois’ second feature will satiate those looking for deeper cuts from the Greek Weird Wave than Yorgos Lanthimos and Christos Nikou, but will hold limited appeal for those who generally look to find comfort at the movies; Zois offers more of the opposite.
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Still, there’s something compelling at the core of “Arcadia,” which takes literally the idea of Marathon becoming a ghost town in its off-season. In a place where tourists come and go, but the residents who cater to their whims can feel stuck in purgatory, Katerina and Yannis aren’t in for a vacation when they’re obliged to stick around for an autopsy after a tragic car crash to identify a body that’s suggested to be their daughter. Rather than stay at a hotel, the couple, at Yannis’ insistence, decide to take over the suddenly vacant rental home that the deceased was booked at, perhaps giving them some answers about what happened leading up to a fatal car crash. Instead, it only opens up more questions, leading Yannis to dip into the pills he can prescribe for himself as a doctor as Katerina accepts the invitation of a local teen Nikos (Asterios Rimagmos Rigas), who takes her across the beach to a bar known as Arcadia to blow off some steam.
Somehow the fact that everyone is naked at Arcadia is not the most disconcerting thing that occurs in Nikos’ company that night, with the teen confessing he’d be nearly 40 now if he hadn’t died in the house where the couple is currently staying. Katerina is told by another ghost that it is the living “that is haunting us, not vice versa.” From the way people grimly lumber around Marathon without much of a pulse, there doesn’t seem to be much difference between the ghosts and their flesh-and-blood counterparts; Zois presents them that way for more admirable reasons than saving on the film’s VFX budget.
As Katerina learns from returning to Arcadia in the broad daylight of the next afternoon, two bar patrons can sit side-by-side in the afterlife, even though a land dispute caused one to stab the other multiple times. Circumstance insists they carry on as if nothing happened. Similarly, the dead and the living appear to be in lockstep when there’s a shared burden of history preventing each other from moving on.
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The conceit works well enough because of the conviction of the entire cast, most notably Papoulia, the unflappable veteran of Lanthimos’ early features “Dogtooth” and “Alps.” Her Katerina experiences a greater number of stumbling blocks than Yannis, moving at a different emotional and physical pace than her husband, stunted entirely at times when her high heels simply freeze. Stark, arresting visuals — courtesy of director of photography Konstantinos Koukoulios — and Peter Dundakov’s ethereal score, with the willowy sound of glass vibrating, add a crisp chill to the film. However, Zois and co-writer Konstantina Kotzmani seem to withhold details for a big reveal that make it difficult to set stronger ground rules in the liminal space the film plays in. As the circle of lost souls swirling around Katerina and Yannis grows, “Arcadia” can be hard to follow at times.
Maybe Zois leans a little too much on the notion that bereavement should be an odd and disillusioning experience, but the original approach opens up some novel ideas around the afterlife and what people carry around when others pass. Yet for all its promise as a provocation, “Arcadia” can be mildly frustrating for the same reasons it is intriguing, leaving an audience in such limbo and, ultimately, occupying a middle ground, for better or worse.
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