and I saw as it were a sea of glass mingled with fire
and them that had gotten victory over the beast
stand on the sea of glass
new testament book 27, revelation of of john verse 15.2
There is a line in Sea of Glass that arrives with the quiet weight that carries the entire film. When someone asks Vicky why she doesn’t simply leave, she says: “And go where?” It’s a question that exposes inescapability not as personal failure but as structural fact — and it’s the question Alexis Alexiou’s third feature keeps turning over, from every angle, across every relationship in it.
The film follows two women whose lives converge at an off-season taverna on the island of Evia. Vangelio — played with extraordinary restraint by Evangelia Andreadaki — is 65, recently widowed after years of tending a bedridden husband, cut off from her sons and whatever she might have wanted for herself.
Vicky, in Christiana Matelska Toka’s remarkable debut, runs the same taverna under the thumb of an alcoholic father who treats her labour as his entitlement and her presence as a punchbag.
The film’s central and most quietly devastating observation is that these are not two different situations. They are the same situation, expressed through different relationships. Daughter and father, wife and husband: the dynamic shifts but the architecture stays identical. The man is cared for. The woman disappears into the caring for survival.
What Alexiou understands, and what makes the film more than a catalogue of grievance, is that this pattern doesn’t announce itself — it accumulates. Catering and care become control, turning into a slow extinction of a self so gradual that by the time you name it, you’ve been living inside it for decades. But the cage cannot see itself: “Life is poison,” Vicky’s father says at one point. “My whole life is a hellfire.” These aren’t dramatic outbursts. They’re inventory.
Alexiou develops the film as more of a catalogue of grievance, showing that this pattern doesn’t announce itself — it accumulates. Catering and care become control, turning into a slow extinction of self so gradual that by the time you name it, you’ve been living inside it for decades.
But it is the man who has made people’s lives unliveable is the one lamenting the state of his own. “Life is poison,” Vicky’s father says at one point. “My whole life is a hellfire.” These aren’t dramatic outbursts from a villain. They’re the self-portrait of someone who has never once considered that the poison might be him. And then, quietly, Vicky: “We used to have good times too.” Where her father sees only his own suffering, she still holds space for the memory of something better. It’s a generosity that is never extended to either woman, and the film knows exactly what to do with that gap.
Water runs through the film as both image and idea — the sea as something that reflects but doesn’t resolve, that absorbs but doesn’t answer. A sequence of moonlit fishing achieves something approaching poetry.
And the film’s sharpest visual idea is the collision between Vangelio’s old imagined version of this place — sun, freedom, the promises of those glossy guidebooks — and the broken reality that Vicky has always known. Two women, two sets of shattered expectations, the same horizon.
Perhaps the Thelma & Louise comparisons are inevitable, but only earns its place in the film’s final movement, when the possibility of escape briefly opens. Alexiou is smart enough not to sentimentalise it.
Instead, he closes with uncertainty, before the screen gives way to a passage from Revelation. It’s a closing image that refuses to offer rescue while insisting on the possibility of transcendence — victory not as escape but as endurance, the beast not slain but survived.
Whether Vicky is standing on that shore or still submerged beneath the sea, the film leaves her where it found the union of both: glittering, unknowable, and absolute.
Grab tickets to Sea of Glass at EIFF here.
