Greek director and composer Alexander Voulgaris returns to Karlovy Vary for the first time since 2007’s Pink with his eight feature, They Come Out of Margo, which has just world-premiered in the Proxima Competition. Definitely one of the weirdest films to figure in this year’s festival programme, it is an experimental horror-musical based on a music album that Voulgaris has released under the moniker The Boy.

The director re-teams with Sofia Kokkali, one of the most recognisable faces in contemporary Greek cinema, who plays Margo, a reclusive composer who used to be a star, but hasn’t played live or released any new music for the past seven years. Around the time she was born, Margo’s sister Margaret was killed, and her body was never found.

The film opens with this murder scene. The 11-year-old girl comes home from school, and somehow, a woman from the cover of a cassette tape appears in her room and strangles her. This rather visceral event is rendered in a succession of fast-cut freeze frames, like a quick-fire photo shoot, an effect that will be used throughout the film, along with many other extravagant visual methods and sound effects. The camera is rarely still; it pans and sweeps and swirls and goes into blurry zooms. The music score virtually blankets the feature, ranging from abstract musique concrète with piano and percussion, through ritual-like drumming, screeching guitars and ethereal voices, a disco-pop number, all the way to full-blown ballads, some of which are dedicated to Athens – The Boy’s key preoccupation.

Margo lives with Rhea (Evi Saolidou), identified in the press notes as her nurse, but their relationship is so close that it’s hard not to mistake it for a romantic one. It’s her 40th birthday, and her friends and collaborators come to celebrate: producer Duke (Ektoras Lygizos), her former babysitter and, later, lyricist Gertrude (Zaklin Polenaki), three singers who performed her songs, and Phoebe (Flomaria Papadaki), a young actress set to play her in an upcoming biopic.

The characters sing like in a traditional musical only in two scenes, but it’s music that drives the film. The most striking segment starts with the guests and Margo cooking cables (she composes on a device combining a synthesiser, a turntable, a switchboard and an old-fashioned gramophone trumpet) and turns into a frenetic group dance that resembles a savage fight. But in the quick succession of freeze frames with the fast, almost ritualistic music, it’s not easy to distinguish what is going on – just like in the plot of the film. 

Through the dialogue, we learn that the title of the work is literal: people are coming out of Margo. We don’t see this process take place, but strange figures simply come onto the scene, and are often menacing or just confusing.

One could argue that this is another horror film that draws on childhood or transgenerational trauma tropes, and it has elements of body horror and occult subgenres as well. But little of the story can be defined, and Margo’s relationship with the other characters lends itself to many possible psychological interpretations. While this cinematic oddity is rarely scary due to its numerous distancing effects, it is certainly idiosyncratic and makes for a very interesting, intense viewing experience. It is probably best to let it work like music, rather than as a narrative film: on an instinctual, subconscious and visceral level.

 They Come Out of Margo was produced by Greek company Filmiki.