‘She Loved Blossoms More’: Thessaloniki Review

Dir: Yannis Veslemes. Greece/France. 2024. 86mins

Yannis Veslemes established himself as one of the voices of the Greek Weird Wave with Norway (2014) and now, co-writing with Dimitris Emmanouilidis, he offers a positive tsunami of oddness with this drugged-up slacker twist on attempted time travel. A delirious mix that features baroque body horror and draws on everything from Eighties fantasy comedy to Mario Bava, Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, it’s little wonder that any sort of fully coherent narrative gets swept away. Still, for those who favour visceral visuals over strong storytelling, it’s a stylish treat.

Genre-bender with cult potential

She Loved Blossoms More is making its bow on home turf at Thessaloniki Film Festival after its world premiere at Tribeca Film Festival earlier this year. It has already had stop-offs at fantasy-focused festivals including Sitges, and further horror events and midnight strand screenings seem likely for this genre-bender with cult potential. Despite its multiple influences, the end result is distinctive and could also appeal to specialist distributors.

Hedgehog (Panos Papadopoulos) and his brothers Dummy (Julio Katsis) and Japan (Aris Balis) live in a shambling pile of a house somewhere near Athens, where they are attempting to turn their mother’s art deco wardrobe into a machine that will bring her back from the dead. It’s an experiment that, so far, is not going well – quite possibly because the lads busily consume industrial quantities of hallucinogenic drugs in between tryouts, leading to results that make The Fly look like child’s play. After a pig meets a sticky end and a chicken loses its head to a different dimension – not that it stops the rest of the animal running around in this one – it seems almost inevitable that a human is also going to have a closet encounter.

Enter Samantha (Sandra Abuelghanam Sarafanova), whose strange sexual assignations with more than one of the siblings are just the beginning of her problems. By this point, however, the narrative has become so slippery it’s hard to tell what is real and what is merely part of the collective psychedelic trip the brothers are taking. One could take issue with the way in which Samantha is treated with no more depth than the pig or the chicken – something the director slyly nods to by giving the character the same name as a turtle that briefly appears, as though he deliberately wants her to be vague.

Yet the characters of the brothers are scarcely more concrete. Instead Veslemes’ real focus lies in world creation and, in that regard, he and art director Elena Vardava craft an environment that is simultaneously grungily real and trippily surreal. The computer parts used for the brothers’ machine have an analogue retro vibe that matches the mansion’s grounds, which boast more ground fog than an Eighties soft metal pop video. The body horror elements, however, are bang up-to-date and stickily authentic, and the arrival of Jeunet and Caro favourite Dominique Pinon as the boys’ demanding father adds further fantasy fuel to the fire.

Over it all flows an endlessly inventive score from the director, goosing the more expected elements of horror music with strange and unsettling additions. Veslemes has had a parallel career as a composer – writing under the name Felizol – and has scored several films in addition to his own, including Suntan (2016).

The plot, like the boys, doesn’t really go anywhere, but that also adds to the troubling mood. The interior of mum’s wardrobe is upholstered, giving it the air of a padded cell, and there are further nods to madness, including a reference to The Shining’s dull boy Jack. Veslemes doesn’t just want us to watch these men slide into insanity, he wants it to wash us away too. Whether you sink or swim in that environment is entirely a matter of taste.