SECOND VIEW LOOK: LIVE FROM MOTELX

This movie opens with text (soon complemented by disturbing archival footage) about behavioural experiments conducted on lab animals in the Sixties and Seventies, before the questionable ethics of these scientific intrusions made them fall out of favour. These tests were intended to determine the biological and psychological mechanisms of love – and this film will indeed foreground love, even as it subjects it to increasingly cruel tests. Its writer/director Denis Iliadis may be best known for his 2009 reimagining of Wes Craven’s rape-revenge horror The Last House on the Left (1972), but here a bourgeois family’s home will be invaded by young romance instead, with a probingly vicious streak.

It is 1995 in Athens, and young adult Argiris (Claudio Kaya) is about to have a very unusual meet-cute – unless you have seen Denys Arcand’s The Decline of the American Empire (1986), which is also focused on familial and sexual relationships, and includes a similar scene. For as he nervously parlays the medical massage that he is receiving into a more intimately sensual one, and the masseuse Mary (Konstantine Messini), who is the same age as him, gamely agrees to his masturbatory request, it is love at first sight, or at least at several strokes – and before the besotted Argiris has had any opportunity to get to know the first thing about his inamorata, she has already invited him over for the weekend to meet the parents, provided, naturally, that he not mention how and where the two of them really met.

If Argiris cannot quite believe his luck, he is about to enter a surreal realm where his every move is being observed, measured and manipulated. For Mary’s uptight mother Sandra (Evelina Papoulia) is a former experimental psychologist who has turned to interior decoration after her groundbreaking work in animal behaviourism was shut down, while her more easy-going husband Yorgos (Yorgos Liantos) is a paediatrician – and over the long weekend in their modernist country house, they are set upon evaluating Argiris’ compatibility with their beloved daughter through a relentless series of challenges.

Not only do Sandra and Yorgos have an elaborate games room in their basement, but they are also playing games in another sense, and Iliadis focalises this obviously damaged household, full of arguments and anger and guilt and sorrow, through the eyes of outsider Argiris who, despite his eagerness to please, is, like us, increasingly bewildered by what he is witnessing and experiencing. Even as the parents express concern for their daughter and her various odd afflictions, Mary confides in Argiris her suspicion that she too, as a child, may have been subjected by her mother to conditioning exercises involving a heart-shaped teddy bear capable of administering electrical shocks – although Mary is not sure if this is a memory of what really happened to her, or something more like a scenario from a bad dream.

Amid all the interrogations and rôle-playing, emotional blackmail and gaslighting, control and violence, Argiris is uncertain if he is seeing one particular family unit in catastrophic freefall, or an amplified, intensified version of the dysfunction universal to any and every family – and he is also, repeatedly, having to question just how far he is willing to go for a girl whom he has, after all, only just met and barely knows. Meanwhile, regular flashbacks to a luxurious restaurant dinner that Mary has with Sandra and Yorgos, where they are clearly struggling to lay their cards on the table, serve only to mystify further what is going on in the present, while introducing a huge amount of tension.

With its ritualised domestic masquerades and ‘Greek Weird Wave’ elusiveness, Buzzheart may recall Yorgos Lanthimos’ Dogtooth (2009), although Iliadis wrote his script in 2005, making the direction(s) of influence more complicated. Both films are, ultimately, modern Greek tragedies, with Iliadis clinging to the romance promised from the outset while also ultimately infusing all this eros with no small amount of thanatos. For here love, even lasting love, must end, and every heart must eventually stop buzzing. It is a peculiar, twisty Liebestod, where all the drama on display is being bequeathed to the next generation just as they are embarking on their own journey of love together.

Here the very notion of family is exposed as a fragile act, performed before cameras so that its footage is available for subsequent analysis and interpretation once a fuller perspective is in place. This makes Iliadis’ twisty, paranoid feature also very much a film about filmmaking – an art whose audiovisual stimuli, designed precisely to condition a response in the viewing subject, easily overlap with the aims of the behavioural sciences. And in keeping with how Argiris and Mary first meet, this delivers a happy, if bittersweet, ending.

Buzzheart just showed at MOTELX, in Lisbon.