Mont Blanc, the domineering and detail-oriented leader of Alps, treats a young female tennis player who has been in a serious car accident and is not expected to live.

The tennis player dies, and Monte Rosa offers her services to the grieving parents, while telling the rest of Alps that the girl has recovered.

Some of Alps' clients are: a man who is mourning an old friend; a blind woman whose philandering husband has died; and the owner of a lamp shop, who has lost his diabetic girlfriend.

The clientele instruct the members of Alps about what they should wear, do, and say, and construct scenarios and reenactments that sometimes cross into emotionally intimate territory, though the interactions tend to be emotionless and transactional.

Although sexual relations with clients are forbidden, Matterhorn regularly kisses the blind woman, and Monte Rosa has sex with the lamp shop owner.

Yorgos Lanthimos and Efthymis Filippou developed the premise for the film out of the idea of people who allege something which is fabricated, for example via prank calls or by announcing their own deaths, and the story took form as they attempted to find a setting that they felt could work well cinematically.

[5] Lee Marshall of Screen Daily called it "a sort of Dogtooth 2", writing that "the cultured urban audiences turned on by the sheer kookiness of that film may feel a slight sense of déjà vu here."

Marshall went on to say that "Hollywood might have fashioned a weepie or a thriller out of the same material - and there are echoes here of some of Hitchcock's fascination with surrogates, from the Roger Thornhill/George Kaplan of North by Northwest to the Madeleine/Carlotta of Vertigo.

It's also a film which manages to juggle absurdist comedy with bleak tragedy, a yearning desire for human warmth with outbreaks of sudden violence, all the while maintaining an impressive control of tone.