‘Novak’ review: Zlatko Buric’s convincing mad scientist elevates this offbeat Greek debut

Dir/scr: Harry Lagoussis. Greece/Switzerland. 2025. 110mins.

The blurred frontier between maniac and visionary is explored to intriguing but uneven effect in Harry Lagoussis’s feature debut, the mad scientist drama Novak. The film ambitiously tackles a range of contemporary themes, centred on a persuasive performance by Zlatko Buric as an ageing doctor rescued from enforced obscurity by a group of zealous young followers. Yet, given the script’s high-stakes issues, the film’s plodding style fails to engage the emotions. Still there is still enough happening to suggest that, following its premiere in Edinburgh International Film Festival’s competition, Novak could move into further festival slots and appeal to audiences with a taste for the thoughtfully offbeat.

Buric builds a compellingly watchable character

The early scenes take a long time to move things into position, indicating a problem with pacing that is never quite overcome. Overweight, wild of hair and apparently as burnt out as the cigarette stubs that mount up in his ashtray, Croatian Dr Novak (Buric, the 2022 European Film Awards best actor for Triangle Of Sadness), rarely leaves his grungy Athens apartment, having been professionally disgraced years before for his morally questionable scientific practices.

One rainy night, wide-eyed idealist Petros (Yannis Papadopoulos) shows up to announce that, some time ago, one of Novak’s inventions – a hydro-saturation device built to prevent humans from the negative effects of electromagnetic fields – almost saved his father’s life. (The technology in Novak looks less Silicon Valley, more Frankenstein.) The time has come, Petros believes, for a Novak comeback.

Petros invites Novak to continue his curtailed research at New Atlantis, a commune in a rambling, atmospheric house owned by Maria (Elena Topalidou). Members of the commune include Louise (Ella Rumpf, Marguerite’s Theorem), who makes short films to raise awareness of electromagnetic pollution (smartphones and social media are inevitably notable by their absence), Max (Nikos Manesis), who is more proactive, damaging cellphone towers at night, and self-harming Daphne (Korina-Anna Gougouli).

First Daphne and then Louise offer themselves up to Novak’s genius. The doctor, his ego freshly massaged, starts to look worryingly like he might repeat his former errors, clipping electrodes onto heads in pursuit of a pure and transcendent mental state to escape the electromagnetic dangers. Inevitably, tensions intensify over the old man’s ethics and start to fracture the commune, and finally, the dramatic stakes begin to rise.

Novak is thematically bang up to date as it explores the themes of unquestioning techno-worship, cult followings and the social dangers of blind submission to authority: the final stretch of the film makes a plea for more human values in the face of this onslaught. But little of this is brought successfully to dramatic life: plotting, pacing and dialogue feel flat throughout, with a couple of scenes – the statutory feelgood visit to the beach, for example – not advancing the plot in a meaningful way. Some sequences feel overstretched, while others end too abruptly.

Buric rises above all this, building a compellingly watchable character on the idea of a mad scientist given a second chance. Novak’s weighty, bearlike charisma make him totally plausible as the object of the commune’s adoration, and Buric brings conviction to inadvertently comic dialogue that too often seems drawn from bad self-help manuals – “True happiness comes from inside”, “Being ourselves is the most revolutionary thing we can do”, etc.

In contrast, Novak’s acolytes are drawn with a broad brush, lack much interiority and are let down by the implausible lines they have to utter. (Petros in particular is hobbled early on by stretches of clumsy B-movie exposition.) The slightly older Maria apart, the group’s sheer gullibility strains belief in the story. There is an interesting point to be made here about Gen Z’s craving for strong leadership in an uncertain world, but Novak never makes it.

An impressive visual imagination is on display, with the cluttered mess of the commune creating a shadowy backdrop and some striking uses of perspective. Lagoussis’s cartoonist background is presumably behind one of Novak’s highlights, a short and darkly comic video made by Louise to warn people of the dangers of electromagnetic pollution. The soundtrack features some terrific low-budget indie pop tunes from the likes of the Seeds and the Fiery Furnaces, suggestions of edginess and energy in a film that could have benefitted from more.