Minore

My Big Fat
Greek Cthulhu

Minore
Directed by Konstantinos Koutsoliotas
Greece 2023 Melancholy Star
Screened 26 August at FrightFest, London

Konstantinos Koutsoliotas’ new film Minore had its European premiere at FrightFest this year and, blimey, I had a strange reaction to this one. If I was to sum it up as a quick snapshot I’d say... it’s what you might get if you crossed a 1980s/90s Jean Paul Gaultier perfume advert with an abundance of alien tentacle monsters. So... hmm.

And I found myself a little bit conflicted with it at first. The film slowly sets up its characters... and I mean slowly. So slowly that for the first third of the movie I got kinda bored fairly quickly although, the beautifully ‘muffled’ bursts of colours... everything looks like it’s been shot using strange filters and coloured lighting... were just enough to maintain my interest. It’s a real scene setter which focuses on all the characters in a coastal town in Greece as we learn of the musicians and dancers of a local café and their various friends and regulars, while a lone sailor has come to the town to seek his father... who walked out on the family when he was a mere boy. However, the slow burn coupled with some lengthy singing and dancing sequences did, I admit, begin to lose me but, then again, it’s certainly a quirky film and that kept me going.

And then it started to get really interesting and then, I’ll be honest, it couldn’t get more quirkier if it was a quirky quirk being quirked over with a quirksome quirk machine on Quirkyday. To say the humour and personality of this movie is unique would be an understatement because... about a half way through, things get decidedly surreal, bloody and, somehow, even more humourous. And, ultimately, beautiful too.

Some ancient monsters which, given some of the dialogue are probably more than a little inspired by The Ancient Ones from H. P. Lovecraft’s many Cthulhu stories, attack the town... slowly at first, over a number of days. Some people go missing... perhaps, like the lady played by beautiful actress Daphne Alexander... they have walked into the sea as a result of a dreamlike state siren song of one of the creatures. Luckily, the sailor played by Davide Tucci pulls her out of harm’s way before she is engulfed by the ocean and whatever lays beneath. But it’s what flies above which is giving a rag tag bunch of heroes (and the villanous local crime kingpin) a battle, as the town’s people put up a fight armed with the knowledge of dreams, where the police and the military have failed. People are being tentacle injected with a substance that quickly eats them from inside, so the flying creatures can suck their bodies up like fluid (among other gory treats on display).

Despite my earlier reservations, by the time I was two thirds of the way through the thing, I was totally into it and was invested enough in some of the ridiculous characters... one of them even does a direct parody of the sword kata scene from the John Milius movie Conan The Barbarian... that I really cared when they lost the odd limb or head going into battle. It doesn’t hold back on the gore, for sure and even includes a memorable ‘face peeling’ sequence.

But throughout this, the film is also very funny and has a strange, dream-like, surrealist state underpinning the narrative which both looks gorgeous but also, yeah, is somewhat obfuscating in terms of the clarity of... well... of what the hell is going on. Some of it was easy to understand, such as the desire to hook big speakers up to kill the monsters in a way, perhaps a little inspired by the movie version of Mars Attacks but, as the movie finished and I moved from the darkness of the cinema housing this phantasmagorial art and out into the light of the crowded FrightFest lobby, I realised I had absolutely no idea of how a lot of it got resolved by the end.

That being said, I didn’t really care either because, by this point... I’d had a really good time with it and, yeah, I think I’d even revisit it again a few years down the line. I need to think on it some more.

Would I recommend Minore to others? Well, like I said, it’s got a pacing all its own and the narrative, such as it is, doesn’t exactly rush but that being said, it’s such a unique little film and, you know, quirky (I mentioned that, yeah?), so I’d have to say that if you are a cineaste who’s seen pretty much everything, then this movie at least has it’s own kind of surrealistic atmosphere and dream logic which is individual enough for you to lift the lid and take a peek. I’m really glad I saw this one because, well, who knows if it will get some kind of cinematic release over here anytime down the line.