A director and his assistant stare through a monitor on the Pitch Dark Charred facade in a house, erected in a sound stage. The house is a copy of it in Solingen, Germany Where a notorious murder fire in 1993 committed a group of young right-wing extremists, five Turkish migrant women and girls in the Genç family left dead.
One of the more eerie early images in Mehmet Akif Büyükatalays (“Snake”) provocative and exciting other function “hysteria” is just superficial a revelation of the overstated genre that is the one film within the film. Some of what makes the picture eerie-in addition the haunting opacity of its black and coal palette, reminiscent of a false abandoned Moria is the intestine it raises about the motivations behind the cinematic reintroduction. To begin with, who tells us who the story and why? The meta -consequences “hysteria” will have to deal with – and which its characters who have no lack of opportunities to pontify – are thus established.
The following is an absorbent story-through a long, character-focused mystery-thriller-that reflects Germany’s continued struggle with its large number of Muslim, especially Turkish, immigrants and refugees. Of course, “Germany’s continued struggle” is the received frame Büyükatalay wants to undermine.
However, the reintroduction is not the film’s urgent incident. After the shooting, a Qur’an was found burned inside the remains of the house – an accident, is alleged – by the group of mostly Turkish men who were introduced as extra from the refugee center as “witnesses” by the aftermath. One of them, Majid (Nazmi Kirik), explains intelligibly for the wise, resourceful half Turkish (it turns out) but completely white suitable trainee elif (devrim lingnau) that only certain types of the koran’s disposal-to-example burning the banks of the saints The river Tigris – is acceptable. “Respect” must be clearly referred to, while Majid insists that there is no respect at all in the combustion of a Qur’an for the sake of a film, no less to satisfy the creative instincts or relieve the trauma that Yiğit claims (Serkan Kaya), the film’s conflicts German director of Turkish descent that was small when the Solingen incident occurred.
As another refugee character, Mustafa (Aziz çapkurt), a former theater director, later an unmatched Elif, films like these (blinks to “hysteria” himself) Kowtow to “Imperation for a pure conscience of Europe.” Here, “hysteria” levels up from counterfeit political drama to a mystery thriller procedure. ELIF inadvertently loses the images from the recreation couples, and in her own nervousness over being blamed on theft or losing the face in front of the remote producer Lilith (Nicolette Krebitz) who can make her a marketing, inserts a chain of events that skillfully builds a tense cliff that Combines the film’s two modes.
Büyükatalay’s script deserves kudos for the high, perhaps extreme, degree of pain as it goes in to implement every character with an ambiguity, a motivation for the crime, an implicit bias, of course and a hardened about Inchoat view of what repairs, religious tolerances, A motivation, an implicit bias, of course and a hardened about inchoat views on what repairs, religious tolerances, a motivation and respect should consist of. The ensemble is not really catching for the socio -political background in contemporary Western Europe, post migrant and Refugee crisis of the 2010s. But the ways Büyükatalay is flexible and accurate with plot turns, and how he characterizes ELIF as a quasi headman – more importantly, he suggests why her uncomfortable biaciality is bound to her personal trust problems – keep us invested in the procedures even when we find ourselves complicated when it Applies to forming alliances with individual characters that reflect our own political inclinations. “Hysteri” is distinguished for Herda such shade even if it fails to break sufficient atmosphere to reach a real single. By using awake terminology from a time when “awake” was not yet interrupted but occupied a genuine place in the global resistance to fascism, the brownness and religiosity of each character are shown on a spectrum of readability and convenience and crosses their lively experience to be oppressed Register of nation, class, color and gender.
For example, Majid’s views such as an older, working class, newly arrived Turkish refugee take the form of black or-white modus pon’s argument: if you burn the Qur’an, you are a Nazi; Yiğit burned the Qur’an, so Yiğit is a Nazi. In contrast, Yiğit dates in sweeping generalizations: “As a minority, they require freedom. But they do not grant anyone when they are in power, “who does not report the fact that he, as Mustafa can express, is also the child of Turkish immigrants and enjoys the white privilege as a member of the German creative class. Lilith, as an ethnically ambiguous German woman who does not pass as easily as Elif keeps her prejudice high up the sleeve, until the gloves arrive in the final confrontation; The calm rationality she has practiced when a sharp producer turns to become a shield for her sense of superiority.
Thus, the layer is based on loaded layers of “hysteria” a mass. The film is interpreted as an educational exercise more than entertainment and has a deep reading in the complicated majority of the population that constitute nations like Germany. The insight that the trauma experienced by a former wave of Muslim immigrants cannot be fully assessed by waves decades later is sober. New regimes have risen in the meantime and absorb old. A movie in a movie cannot come close to approximate megap powers such as neoliberalism, which uses and spits out Islamophobia and racism as a systemic one.
However, intellectual insight does not complete a movie. “Hysteri” collapses to an extent under the mass of its own literalness and carbohydrates, even when it tries to marry mystery and excitement with political poignant. The misee-en scene towards the end feels clumsy, even a little relaxed, and the plot is forced.
Oddly enough, the Qur’an itself is shot to the side, a burnt artifact whose light is closed and whose fire is doused. If the ultimate others are the eerie invisible image that Büyükatalay is aiming for, perhaps his film may also join the broad story that has assessed bookbringing.
Rating: B.
“Hysteri” premiered at 2025 Berlin Film festival. It is currently seeking US distribution.
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