Invisible

Invisible is a film with a purely cinematic narrative, a film that mixes forms. Thriller with realism, western with fantasy, although Invisible has to do, or it seems so, with a social theme.

The directing style of Athanitis has an originality, which denies linearity to follow better his main hero, Aris (the name means Mars), who confuses reality with imagination, crosses the living space with a heartbreaking despair, which has no name, invisible, as he is too.

If you thought the western genre only exists against the prairies of an American frontier, think again. With Invisible, filmmaker Dimitris Athanitis adeptly draws from western tropes to tell of a gritty fight against injustice in urban Greece.

In a career-defining, bravura performance, Yannis Stankoglou plays Aris - a 38-year-old factory worker who is fired without warning. He is floored by the shock and any attempts to be re-hired fail miserably. As his distress builds, he becomes more and more fixated on taking justice into his own hands but even these plans are thwarted when his ex-wife saddles him with their six-year-old son.

With eerie accuracy and detail, Athanitis shows how the powerless and undervalued can be society's most dangerous time bombs just waiting to explode. The end of the film, or rather the choreography of the end, is also completely astonishing and unpredictable.