Screened as part of the Glasgow Film Festival 2021

Apples, the debut feature from Christos Nikou, offers an insightful and heartfelt take on the nature of memory, identity and loss in a quiet, almost meditative drama. The film follows an unnamed man who has seemingly lost his memory, a condition which seems to be spreading exponentially across the country. This condition is so troubling and widespread that memory recovery centres programs have been established in a bid to address this troubling wave of ‘sudden amnesia’ amongst the population. At first glance, this description may read as if Apples is treading into the waters of dystopian sci-fi cinema, along the lines of Children of Men or Blindness, but in reality it’s a character study of psychological trauma and the desire to forget one’s past, reminiscent of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

As is perhaps inevitable, Apples‘ tale of an isolated individual wanting to reach out and reconnect with a society that seems to be forgetting what it once was, hits a lot harder in a post-Covid era, despite going into production prior to the pandemic. Its eerie surface level prescience is also deflected somewhat by the strangely timeless quality it appears to be striving for, with the scientists of the memory recovery centre utilising analogue technology including tape recorders and instamatic cameras, despite the clearly 21st century setting. The social commentary underlining the centre’s attempts to re-introduce the forgotten and forgetting to the world through purely superficial means, via tape recordings which ask each amnesiac to create new memories by documenting their check-list of experiences with awkwardly posed ‘selfies’ for their analogue scrapbooks, would perhaps have been too blatant had the film depict these characters using smart phones and social media. Nonetheless, the film’s patient construction and carefully underplayed narrative reveals, alongside Aris Servetalis’s performance as the unnamed protagonist – the evident melancholy and insecurity he radiates throughout the film – make Apples an almost devastatingly apt portrayal of pandemic life and its aftermath.