Christos Nikou’s Apples is a film that feels more in tune with the quirk yet said indies of the turn of the 21st century more than it feels like a late entry to the Greek Weird Wave. Someone probably already wrote why many of the films in the previous wave dealt with memory, but if not, someone smarter than me should. The viewers never hear the protagonist’s name, but the credits call him Aris (Aris Servetalis) and we’ll do the same. There’s a lot in the copy about how he’s middle aged, and Nikou and co-writer Stavros Raptis use the fact that this man dresses well and is in his 40s but is still single. Anyway, he lives in a world where there’s a pandemic that makes the afflicted lose their memory.

And that happens to Aris fifteen minutes into a film that clocks in at 90 minutes. Nikou does enough world building without going too far in his film. Here, if someone with pandemic amnesia is lucky enough to have someone claim them, they get to go home. The lack of IDs and digital technology here makes identification difficult. If no one claims them, they’re at the mercy of whatever healthcare system they belong too. In this fictional version of Greece, a few doctors take charge of these amnesiacs. Aris’ doctors, specifically, gives him tapes to instruct him on how to live after his affliction. This is good for Aris, who only remembers his love for apples after losing his memory.

What complicates things is that there is one scene when Aris talks to a dog that he knows before he lost his memory. Nikou then asks the question of whether he’s faking or that the only thing he knows in his former life is really this dog? A few other complications follow, like how the instructions get riskier and more emotionally manipulative, like steal a bike. And how he meets a woman (Sofia Georgovassili) with the same affliction. As the film progresses, both the doctors and Aris do amoral things. I get it, just because characters do bad things don’t mean that the film they belong in is automatically bad. But why should I care about a protagonist who breaks into his new friend’s house, regardless of what others are doing to him?

Yes, Apples can give some viewers moral reservations, and it also feels like both everything and nothing happens after the film sets up its premise. But there’s always a special place in my hear for a film that is less quirky and more melancholic. It makes us ask more questions than the ones I already raised above. What is it like to experience things for the first time? The part of the premise where there’s no digital technology is also interesting. That’s because of how digitization, in my and many people’s opinions, makes meta experiences instead of ones without filters. But the film argues that those filters exist regardless of how we experience them. Regardless, this film rewards its viewers upon repeat viewings.

Watch Apples in select Canadian theatres starting July 8.