Siccîn (2014)

For reasons only known to herself, Öznur (Ebru Kaymakci) has been in rather mad love with her cousin, butcher Kudret (Koray Sahinbas) for a very long time. Even when a black magician (and apparently fortune-teller) foresees that her love will bring her death, she’s unrelenting.

Years later, some time after her lack of love drove her own husband to suicide, apparently, Öznur actually must have managed to sleep with Kudret, for she is now pregnant with his child. Alas, Kudret is now married to Nisa (Pinar Caglar Genctürk), with a blind daughter and a mostly paralysed and bedridden mother-in-law. He’s also, not to put to fine a point on it, a total piece of shit unwilling to take responsibility for anything he does or says: apparently, Öznur “tricked” him into sleeping with her; he’s also at best cold and often enough abusive to his wife, ignores his sick mother in law and sees her as a burden, and is even partially responsible for the sightlessness of his daughter. In any case, he prefers sitting around with his best male buddy to being at home with his family.

When Öznur tells him about her pregnancy, Kudret hits her while berating her to get an abortion, causing a miscarriage, for which he of course does not feel responsible at all.

Disappointingly, this is not a film about the bastard getting his comeuppance. Instead Öznur now goes back to the black magician from before to get him to devise a spell to make Kudret all hers. He’s going for some pig-based djinn conjuring that’s supposed to kill everyone of Kudret’s family but the guy himself. The results are nasty indeed, though not quite as Öznur wanted them to be.

This is the first of a pretty steadily running, and apparently rather popular and commercially successful, series of Turkish horror movies directed by Alper Mestçi. While I am a bit dubious about the film’s moral stance towards who is the greatest asshole in it (it certainly cuts Kudret much more slack than my concept of – admittedly very non-religious - ethical principles would allow), and do certainly find its treatment of Öznur as a character rather problematic, I really can’t argue with the film’s effectiveness as a horror movie. It has an admirable willingness to go into nasty and uncomfortable places, where the most helpless and innocent characters suffer in horrible ways as much as the guilty ones.

Interestingly, while the film’s text always seems to suggest a deeply moralizing streak based on what I assume to be the mainstream values of contemporary Turkish society, in practice, guilty and innocent are suffering alike, here, with punishment for wickedness only arriving once the less wicked characters have suffered and died. Things also do finish in a very sudden way that’s really more 70s downer horror ending than religious horror. As someone unfortunately not terribly knowledgeable about the way religion and worldly life come together to form public morality in Turkey, I’m not quite sure if the film is selling a more nihilist creed under the guise of Islamic horror (try reading something like the The Conjuring films without knowledge of Evangelical Christianity and Warren bullshit to understand what my problems with finding the proper interpretation is), or if this is how this kind of plot is supposed to work out and I’m just misreading it with culturally inappropriate eyes.

What I can say is that Siccîn does contain some highly effective and pleasantly unpleasant set pieces that suggest Mestçi to be a pretty ruthless director of the nastier business in horror. It’s not elegant filmmaking for most of the time, but then, this is clearly a film aiming for your guts and not for whatever organ is responsible for your aesthetic pleasure, really going for it quite unrelentingly once the plot gets going.