Musallat (2007)

Freshly married Suat (Burak Özçivit) has left his new wife Nurcan (Bigkem Karavus) behind in the small village in Turkey they both come from and has come to Berlin to earn the kind of money you just can’t make in a place like his home. He’s suffering rather badly under the separation from wife and home, as well as his isolation in a strange and xenophobic country whose language he doesn’t speak, with his childhood friend Metin (Ibrahim Can) his only real human contact. So it’s not much of a surprise that he falls into a deep depression.

There’s more than “just” psychological toil brewing for him, or rather, parts of this toil are caused by some kind of supernatural agency that brings with it visions and illusions, dreams-within-dreams-within-dreams and which seems to set out to further his inner and outer isolation. Eventually, things become so bad, Metin accompanies Suat to Istanbul where they seek the help of mystic (if any Turkish reader should have a better term for the man’s role, I’d be only too happy to be enlightened) Haci Burhan Kasavi (Kurtulus Sakiragaoglu). Things don’t work out terribly well for anyone involved, but at least a pretty classic Weird Tales kind of turn of events will enlighten the audience about what has been really going on here.

On a technical level, Musallat, Alper Mestçi’s first of quite a number of horror movies he has directed by now is not a terribly impressive film. It’s clearly made on a bit of a shoestring budget, cutting visual corners wherever it can, so camera work, lighting, production design and special effects tend to look cheap for most of the film’s running time, though there are a couple of pretty effective moments when it comes to the scarier stuff.

The script, however, is the good kind of interesting, much more interested in telling an actually story in a semi-twisty way than in delivering a series of shocks. This leads to a somewhat cumbersome structure with the truth of the matter taking up half an hour of the film’s running time in the end, not exactly helping make the film dramatic, yet it also provides Musallat the time to talk about some themes I haven’t seen often – if at all – treated in a horror movie before. Particularly the inclusion of Suat’s very specific to “foreigners” in Germany kind of culture shock and isolation is not something you’ll find shown in cinema, genre or not, very often and Musallat really manages to connect his feeling of having stepped into a different and crueller world very well to the supernatural shenanigans on a thematic as well as on an emotional level.

Obviously, I’m also rather fond of the film’s cultural specificity. Given that most possession movies we get to see around here feature the same (pop) cultural exorcism tropes of an Evangelical or Catholic bend, I’m all on board with learning what genre movie Ifrit are getting up to. How much or how little the film’s depiction has to do with actual Muslim and Turkish thought, practice, religion, or folklore, I’m not really in a position to judge (all my knowledge of jinn lore coming from a couple of blog posts or perhaps a Fortean Times article or two), but that it’s simply more interesting and new from my chair in Germany, I most certainly can say.


Musallat gets additional love from me for use of that much-loved (by me) and certainly well-worn trope of the tale we are watching being written down by a man in the process of bleeding out, something Lovecraft would have approved of rather a lot. Some things are clearly international.