News

Borne on the back of a juvenile performance of remarkable intelligence and spontaneity, Vardis Marinakis’ fine-boned “Zizotek” has an uncanny shimmer to its storytelling: It slips unnoticed from genre to genre like a quiet child moving between rooms trying not to disturb the adults. Starting out as a family drama of parental neglect and abandonment, it then becomes a woodsy survivalism tale and an odd-couple bonding narrative, before even those earthy elements fall away and we’re left with the delicate, skeleton-leaf framework of a myth, or a fairy tale — one of the dark kind that ends weirdly, rather than happily, ever after. Only the Greek director’s second feature, its effect is peculiar and moving and subtly bewitching, like a dream where you’re not sure at exactly which point you started dreaming.

A delicate balance between prosaic reality and the softer, subjective perception of a child is present from the outset,...