Post-apocalyptic wasteland somewhere in Greece.An unnamed female wanderer wants to reach the Sea.She attempts to traverse through decaying and crumbling nameless city where the members of Morning Patrol kill everyone they meet.Forbidden zone is extremely dangerous.But the woman manages to get help from a lonely guard in despair and so it begins their intimate link between love and death.Very moody and dark post-apocalyptic science-fiction/neo-noir flick with splendid location sets and dialogue excerpts taken from published works written by Daphne du Maurier,Philip K. Dick,Raymond Chandler and Herman Raucher.The plot moves slowly but visions of an abandoned dead-dripping city are mesmerizing.8 industrial collapses out of 10.
7 Reviews
Beautiful monologues in a postapocalyptic landscape
nefeli915 November 2020
A woman navigates through a deserted city in a post-apocalyptic world: she remembers nothing about who she is or what happened. All she knows is she needs to keep walking. It's not clear what caused humanity to get to this point. She fights off enemies who try to kill her, she steals all the resources she can find and all this while we listen to a beautiful hazy internal monologue which is almost poetic.
She then meets a man and forces him to help her get out of the city. He doesn't remember anything either: only that he must kill everyone he finds that is trying to survive. He continues the beautiful monologue while being lost himself. Together they struggle to survive, remember and find meaning in this.
I liked how the film didn't follow the usual commercial line for post apocalyptic and sci fi movies. It left a lot for the viewer to interpret, the action was relatively slow and there weren't a lot of characters. At some points though, I wish the plot moved a little faster.
Overall a really good movie that I suggest to anyone.
A moving and intelligent look at the end of the world
propast21 August 2010
That this masterpiece is so unknown - undistributed throughout all the world, as far as I know, besides Greece - is nothing short of criminal. In terms of tone, it's most comparable to a slower, more elegiac Blade Runner - there's the same pervading sense of despair, of a deep, dark curtain coming down on the world. Exit stage right.
It follows an unnamed woman wandering through a postapocalyptic wasteland. The people she comes across generally try to kill her, if she doesn't try to kill them first. Communication seems to fallen by the wayside and all the dialogue we get is the woman's internal monologue, a haze of sentimental memories and a longing for a better time.
She works her way into a city, where food, shelter, and water are comparatively plentiful. It's every bit as much a wasteland as the outside world, but of a very different kind - abandoned technology makes its presence known constantly, including a memorable scene where the woman sits alone in a movie theatre, but for the unseen assailants slowly climbing and crawling over seats, working their way toward her.
She meets a guard of the morning patrol, a kind of taskforce that has taken it upon itself to kill everyone it becomes aware of. Their job is more a mercy in this kind of world, and although their technological, inhuman precision marks them as the bad guys, they're practically saviours when life itself becomes an enemy.
I won't go farther that on the off-chance that you're given a chance to see it - but either way, the plot is far from the point and doesn't unfold much differently than you'd expect it to. What does matter is a connection established between two nameless, faceless people floating in a void of memory and space, a timeless land where life and death blur together and the hope for a new horizon outweighs the need to exist. Alive or dead, it hardly matters.
It follows an unnamed woman wandering through a postapocalyptic wasteland. The people she comes across generally try to kill her, if she doesn't try to kill them first. Communication seems to fallen by the wayside and all the dialogue we get is the woman's internal monologue, a haze of sentimental memories and a longing for a better time.
She works her way into a city, where food, shelter, and water are comparatively plentiful. It's every bit as much a wasteland as the outside world, but of a very different kind - abandoned technology makes its presence known constantly, including a memorable scene where the woman sits alone in a movie theatre, but for the unseen assailants slowly climbing and crawling over seats, working their way toward her.
She meets a guard of the morning patrol, a kind of taskforce that has taken it upon itself to kill everyone it becomes aware of. Their job is more a mercy in this kind of world, and although their technological, inhuman precision marks them as the bad guys, they're practically saviours when life itself becomes an enemy.
I won't go farther that on the off-chance that you're given a chance to see it - but either way, the plot is far from the point and doesn't unfold much differently than you'd expect it to. What does matter is a connection established between two nameless, faceless people floating in a void of memory and space, a timeless land where life and death blur together and the hope for a new horizon outweighs the need to exist. Alive or dead, it hardly matters.
A post apocalyptic nightmare
gantalf7524 August 2008
It's the near future, and a catastrophe (plague, war, who knows?) has let the few survivors to wander aimlessly in the wild. One of them, a woman, wants only to "go West, to the sea" where she believes life could be better but in order to achieve that, she must go through a ghost city which is guarded by the Morning Patrol (Proini Peripolos).
Proini Peripolos is really far from Hollywood movies or blockbusters. It's just an artistic movie with slow pace and it's real power is the setting with grim pictures, atmospheric music and isolated landscapes. Try to find it if you can although the language (it's in Greek) will be a problem for foreign audiences.
Proini Peripolos is really far from Hollywood movies or blockbusters. It's just an artistic movie with slow pace and it's real power is the setting with grim pictures, atmospheric music and isolated landscapes. Try to find it if you can although the language (it's in Greek) will be a problem for foreign audiences.
Greek Stalker
HiVita12 April 2018
Blade Runner meets Stalker.
It's an unique, poetic, fascinating Sci-fi movie , which few viewers will appreciate.
In an post-apocalyptic desolate world, a woman wanders trying to survive from the dark, the desolation and the morning patrol.
The viewer will wander by woman's side to dark city's narrows and to beautiful landscapes, inspired from atmospheric music and pictures.
The Morning Report.
morrison-dylan-fan23 August 2019
Warning: Spoilers
Out of all the films I've been lucky to view, Singapore Sling (1990-also reviewed) has been the only movie where I looked online afterwards, to find out if the director had a mental breakdown during production. This is due to how off the wall the transgressive black and white Noir Horror (not Giallo!) was. Spotting a Sci-Fi film by the film maker appearing in ICM lists for best films of 1987,I joined the morning patrol.
View on the film:
The second reel in what became the loose "The Shape of the Coming Nightmare" trilogy, writer/director Nikos Nikolaidis plays his love of Neo-Noir which would become off the wall in Singapore Sling (1990),into the apocalypse by masterfully sowing extracts of Raymond Chandler/ Philip K. Dick/ Herman Raucher and Daphne Du Maurier's works into his own dialogue, that gives the Post-Apocalypse landscape Nikolaidis paints,the philosophical doom-laden weight of Film Noir. A future where no one has a number,Nikolaidis pulls the partnership between "Woman" and one of the Morning Patrol guards with a rustic earthiness, reflected in Women expressing herself via inner monologue,and the clipped dialogue of the Morning Patrol guard stabbing the decayed anxiety of stepping into other wasteland areas guarded by fellow Morning Patrol's.
Bringing the extracts read as dialogue into focus, director Nikolaidis & cinematographer Dinos Katsouridis cleverly place flickering images of Film Noir titles playing on TV and at a cinema with no projectionist in sight, which touch on the flickering memory Woman and everyone else has to a present which was not bleeding with the bleakness of Film Noir. Scanning over burnt out buildings and rusted metal in stylish long panning shots,Nikolaidis closely works with composer Giorgos Hatzinasios and sound mixer Thanassis Arvanitis in washing over the viewer a hypnotic, ambient atmosphere, crackling on the sparse sound of running against the drenched backdrop of the Post-Apocalypse,before the sun comes up,and it is time for the morning patrol.
View on the film:
The second reel in what became the loose "The Shape of the Coming Nightmare" trilogy, writer/director Nikos Nikolaidis plays his love of Neo-Noir which would become off the wall in Singapore Sling (1990),into the apocalypse by masterfully sowing extracts of Raymond Chandler/ Philip K. Dick/ Herman Raucher and Daphne Du Maurier's works into his own dialogue, that gives the Post-Apocalypse landscape Nikolaidis paints,the philosophical doom-laden weight of Film Noir. A future where no one has a number,Nikolaidis pulls the partnership between "Woman" and one of the Morning Patrol guards with a rustic earthiness, reflected in Women expressing herself via inner monologue,and the clipped dialogue of the Morning Patrol guard stabbing the decayed anxiety of stepping into other wasteland areas guarded by fellow Morning Patrol's.
Bringing the extracts read as dialogue into focus, director Nikolaidis & cinematographer Dinos Katsouridis cleverly place flickering images of Film Noir titles playing on TV and at a cinema with no projectionist in sight, which touch on the flickering memory Woman and everyone else has to a present which was not bleeding with the bleakness of Film Noir. Scanning over burnt out buildings and rusted metal in stylish long panning shots,Nikolaidis closely works with composer Giorgos Hatzinasios and sound mixer Thanassis Arvanitis in washing over the viewer a hypnotic, ambient atmosphere, crackling on the sparse sound of running against the drenched backdrop of the Post-Apocalypse,before the sun comes up,and it is time for the morning patrol.
Mesmerizing darkness
opiostheloego12 October 2015
Warning: Spoilers
If you are lucky enough to find this film, do not loose the opportunity to watch it. Do not loose the opportunity to devour its powerful mesmerizing darkness. Intensely majestic, scary, impressive, unique, exceptional, this 80's Greek film will certainly leave you speechless.
She lives in a post-apocalyptic city. A city that is abandoned, a city that is dark and in ruins. A city where you see dripping ceilings, basements with pods of water, staircases partly blocked and humid. What makes this canvas even darker and scarier is that the lights are on, TV sets are also left on by the people who have fled, a cinema still plays a film noir...So much dark there is that even daylight seems to have left or has already packed and is ready to leave, since it is almost absent.
Leaving this city is her goal, like many people have done already. She is not in a good health, she looks weak and speaks with Herself a lot, narrating Her few remaining memories. She is chased not only by "remnants of people" but also by the Morning Patrol. They move around the city, kill the people who are left behind, and the ones that try to leave, heading West to reach the Sea...like Herself. She will come across Him, one of them, a killer but someone that is suffering exactly the same, and deep down inside feels Her deeply. Together they will march towards the desirable salvation...
She lives in a post-apocalyptic city. A city that is abandoned, a city that is dark and in ruins. A city where you see dripping ceilings, basements with pods of water, staircases partly blocked and humid. What makes this canvas even darker and scarier is that the lights are on, TV sets are also left on by the people who have fled, a cinema still plays a film noir...So much dark there is that even daylight seems to have left or has already packed and is ready to leave, since it is almost absent.
Leaving this city is her goal, like many people have done already. She is not in a good health, she looks weak and speaks with Herself a lot, narrating Her few remaining memories. She is chased not only by "remnants of people" but also by the Morning Patrol. They move around the city, kill the people who are left behind, and the ones that try to leave, heading West to reach the Sea...like Herself. She will come across Him, one of them, a killer but someone that is suffering exactly the same, and deep down inside feels Her deeply. Together they will march towards the desirable salvation...
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