‘Sea of Glass’: Alexis Alexiou’s Country Gothic Noir Hits Greece Nov. 12

Alexis Alexiou’s third feature, “Sea of Glass,” reaches Greek cinemas on Nov. 12, following a special screening at the Thessaloniki International Film Festival (Nov. 5–15) and an out-of-competition premiere at Edinburgh. Variety’s chief film critic Guy Lodge has already praised it as a “stately, moody Greek tragedy.”

The film stars Evangelia Andreadaki (“Arcadia,” “Little England”) as Vangelio, a 65-year-old woman trapped caring for her abusive, bedridden husband. She escapes into old guidebooks and dreams of the sea. When her husband dies suddenly, she makes what Alexiou calls a “reckless” decision: she goes on holiday.

Vangelio books a room at a shabby resort on the outskirts of Chalkida, capital of the island of Evia. There she meets Vicky, played by newcomer Christiana Matelska Toka — a tough twentysomething running the family business while caring for her alcoholic father (Michalis Iatropoulos). When his bullying turns violent one night, Vangelio steps in to protect her, setting up a stormy confrontation and an eventual flight for liberation.

Alexiou, best known for the Tribeca-premiering Athens crime thriller “Wednesday 04:45,” calls the new film a “country gothic noir.” He told Variety the project began with a treatment his co-writer Afroditi Nikolaidou wrote in a single day: “two women stuck in the middle of nowhere in a rundown seaside resort, who unexpectedly come together to confront their own past.”

What drives the story?

“At the heart of the story, it’s about family relationships,” Alexiou says. Both women are trapped in dysfunctional parent-child dynamics, from opposite sides of the generational divide. Vicky weathers her father’s abuse; Vangelio reckons with her regrets as a mother and how silently enduring her husband’s violence shaped her grown-up sons.

The director cites “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” “Cape Fear” and “Thelma & Louise” as touchstones. From the first, he borrows “a lonely hero that comes into town and upsets the balance of the smalltown community” — but with a contemporary twist. Instead of an intense love affair, the film revolves around “two women who are seeking companionship and solidarity.”

The setting carries its own weight. Nikolaidou, who grew up frequenting her family’s vacation home in such a resort town, insists there’s “absolutely nothing interesting about a petit bourgeois seaside resort in Evia.” You’d only arrive by accident, she says — no room or table elsewhere, or a grandmother prescribed a seaside holiday.

Yet these towns have a “secret side.” “These smalltown resorts, just like the rest of invisible Greece, were places of brutality: girls being locked up in seaside flats in the height of summer so men couldn’t get their hands on them, or constrained to local taverns, serving middle-class Athenian holidaymakers,” Nikolaidou says. “These small seaside resorts…haven’t changed much since then. And ‘Sea of Glass’ bears the memories and scars of this hibernating world.”

The landscape itself echoes the theme. The filming area was once swamp, until developers reclaimed the marshlands in the 1970s and ’80s and built large apartment blocks. Now the tide is turning. “Slowly, the nature is starting to reclaim the area,” Alexiou says. “In the end, nature has its own will. It will come back and fight” — a parallel with Vicky, whose defiant nature refuses to be tamed.

The film is written by Alexiou and Nikolaidou and produced by Greece’s Tugo Tugo Prods., in co-production with Bulgaria’s Portokal and Cyprus’s Bark Like a Cat Films, with collaboration from Felony Film, Marni Films, Jungle Films and Serbia’s Cinnerent. The cast also includes Nikos Georgakis (“Truants”), Thanos Tokakis (“Tokakis or What’s My Name”) and Dimitris Tzoumakis (“Wednesday 04:45”). Simon Sarketzis (“Little England,” “Behind The Haystacks”) shot the film.

After Thessaloniki, the Nov. 12 limited release will test whether this “country gothic noir” can carry Greek arthouse audiences into Evia’s off-season darkness.