Boy With the Light-Blue Eyes Review Greek Folk Horror Debut at SXSW London

Thanasis Neofotistos spent twelve years making his debut feature. It shows, not in the way that usually reads as a warning, but in the way that matters: every department locked in, every image deliberate, a world so precisely built you stop questioning whether it could exist and start accepting that it does.

The Boy With the Light-Blue Eyes world premiered at SXSW London 2026's Screen Festival on 4 June, and it is one of the most assured debut features in recent Greek cinema. That is not a soft compliment. Greek film has produced Lanthimos, Tsangari, Tzoumerkas, a generation that weaponised the domestic and the absurd into something distinctly their own. Neofotistos is working in related territory, but where Lanthimos keeps his families cold and his allegories clinical, this is warmer, more mythic, closer to folk horror than sociological dissection.

The story

Teenager Petros (Giorgos Karydis) lives in a remote mountain village, shot in the fog-wrapped stone streets of Dimitsana in Arcadia, forced to wear a mask over his eyes at all times. His mother Lemonia (Syrmo Keke) and grandmother Margarita (Sofia Filippidou), who is also the village mayor, maintain the fiction that he has a photosensitivity condition. The village understands the real reason: Petros has light blue eyes, and in this world that marks him as cursed. His only breathing room is Aemon (Pablo Soto), his closest friend, who takes him at face value.

The queer coding is not subtle, nor is it trying to be. Neofotistos, who came out to his own conservative family in his thirties, confirmed at the post-screening Q&A what the film makes plain from its first act: Petros is his alter ego, the mask is not about eyes, and the village's terror of what Petros might infect them with is recognisable to anyone who has grown up different in a place that needed you not to be. As a queer coming-of-age film it works precisely because it never announces itself as one. The allegory is load-bearing without being labelled.

How it's made

The film's most immediately striking quality is its sound. Designer Valia Tserou builds a world you cannot escape. The wind turbine that sits beyond the village, never seen but always heard, functions as a constant low-grade pressure: the swoosh of its blades present under quieter scenes, rising as tension accumulates. The ambient texture more broadly, the rustle of swamp reeds, the animal weight of thunder, the insidious hum beneath domestic interiors, does more atmospheric work than most scores. Sound here is not illustration. It is structure.

Cinematographer Djordje Arambasic works in a palette that is largely subdued, mist, stone, shadow, with deliberate pops of colour in ceramics, clothing, blood. The framing of Petros is consistent and pointed: at the edge of the frame, alone, contained. The one sustained exception is any scene with Aemon, where the camera finally centres him. It is not a subtle device but it is an effective one.

Neofotistos, trained as an architect before turning to film, uses space as character throughout. The aspect ratio shifts, contracting to 4:3 when Petros is at his most trapped and opening as he moves toward the mist and the turbine, are calibrated enough that you feel them before you identify them. The close-ups are relentless and correct: the film is about a face that cannot be seen, so the camera does not look away from it.

The nylon deserves its own mention. Margarita's obsession with wrapping everything in plastic, the village is preparing to leave and furniture and belongings are swathed in sheeting throughout, runs through the film as one of its richest images. It is the logic of someone who wants to preserve and escape simultaneously: protection, self-deception, and eventually something that works its way into everyone's behaviour. It is the kind of detail that separates a film that has been genuinely thought through from one that has been assembled. The sound-as-dread approach has something in common with Villeneuve's Dune, a film where the environment presses on the characters before anything happens, and the fairy-tale structure and queer undertow recall Lucile Hadžihalilović's The Ice Tower (premiered Berlinale 2025), which similarly uses the fable form as a container for a young person being shaped into something manageable by adults. But Neofotistos is doing neither of those things exactly. His film is more personal and less controlled than either.

Performances

Giorgos Karydis carries the film in a mask for 96 minutes and makes Petros's interiority completely readable: longing, confusion, terror, the specific flatness of someone who has learned to perform compliance. It is disciplined work from a newcomer.

Sofia Filippidou is the film's anchor. A major figure in Greek theatre and screen since the early 1970s, trained at the State Conservatory of Thessaloniki and a presence across five decades of Greek stage, her Margarita is not a villain. She is a woman who has decided love looks like control, and Filippidou plays that without softening it or explaining it. The performance is commanding and precise.

Syrmo Keke as the mother is the harder role, permanently caught between Margarita and Petros, never quite acting on her own instincts, and Keke makes something genuinely stifled of it. Pablo Soto as Aemon has to embody freedom convincingly without the film explaining why he has it when Petros doesn't, and he manages it.

The second act has a structural problem. Petros transgresses, is warned, transgresses again, is warned again. The pattern repeats enough times that the accumulation reads as padding rather than escalation. The film knows what it is building toward but takes too long to get there, and the repetition costs it momentum it does not fully recover.

Which makes the ending matter more than it should have to. To say whether it works without saying what happens: mostly, it does. The final act tightens, the unmasking lands, and Neofotistos earns the emotional release he has been building toward for 90 minutes. What follows is more ambiguous, deliberately so, and the film is wise enough not to resolve what it set out to leave open. It does not completely close the distance created by the second act, but it closes enough.

The deliberate pacing and refusal to make the allegory explicit will genuinely exclude some audiences. That is a consequence of the film's integrity, not a flaw, but it is a consequence worth naming.

The Boy With the Light-Blue Eyes is a precisely realised folk horror allegory that announces a filmmaker with a specific vision and the technical command to execute it. The sound design alone is worth your time. The structural sag in the second act is real and it costs the film its fifth star. What surrounds it holds.

Twelve years in the making. It gave us something aesthetically beautiful to sit with. Long after the credits, it sent me back to the Slavic and Ukrainian folk tales I grew up with — reaching for them again after years.

The Boy With the Light-Blue Eyes | Dir. Thanasis Neofotistos | Greece / 7-country co-production | 96 mins | World premiere: SXSW London Screen Festival, 4 June 2026

Screenplay: Thanasis Neofotistos & Grigoris Skarakis

Cinematography: Djordje Arambasic

Sound design: Valia Tserou

Editing: Panagiotis Angelopoulos

Music: Igor Vasilev Novogradska

Production design: Dafni Kalogianni

Producer: Ioanna Bolomyti

Cast: Giorgos Karydis, Pablo Soto, Syrmo Keke, Sofia Filippidou