Entertainment

These hills are alive with the dead

‘Who’s your favorite actor?” asks a paramedic, as he rides with a bloodied young woman in the back of an ambulance. It might be a kindly attempt to distract her, except he just told her that she’s quite likely to die.

So goes every scene in Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Alps,” with familiar morphing into strange. The structure becomes its own kind of predictability, but the premise is a hook all the same: The Alps are a group of people — the paramedic leader (Aris Servetalis), a nurse (Aggeliki Papoulia), a gymnast (Ariane Labed) and her frightening coach (Johnny Vekris) — who, for a fee, impersonate dead loved ones for grieving people.

The Alps are bad actors; the nurse in particular re-creates the dearly departed with all the verve of HAL in “2001.” But the bereft clients don’t require authenticity, and what they choose to re-create is fascinating — often moments of deep pain. Director Lanthimos (“Dogtooth”) keeps the pace deliberate and the camera stable as he pushes people to one side of the frame, frequently while someone watches hungrily, out of focus and out of time.

That all this would come with costs quite apart from whatever fee the group charges is also predictable. The movie focuses tightly and obviously on role playing, but the most unsettling observations concern how fragile it all is — our health, our minds, our denial of death.