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Cagan Irmak is an acclaimed Turkish director who proves in his new movie “KARANLIKTAKILER / IN DARKNESS” that his success is not a coincidence.
For me, he is a very extraordinary director who uses the same formula in all of his big screen projects but never repeats himself. His formula is very simple: He takes all the time to develop the story, masterfully depicts the environment and makes you feel very familiar with it, and then bam: one single great peak point at the end of the story.
He does not try any tricks while he is showing us the world of the characters in the story. Instead, he takes a very straightforward approach, and just tells us who these characters are. He does not try to twist the story, nor tries to startle the audience with unexpected issues until the end of the story. He uses all the time to tell us who these characters are, how they live, how they interact with each other and the world they live in. And when it comes to the end, he gives us one single twist of the story, but a very striking one, something which really hits you.
In all of his movies he tells a very different story. In the movie “Babam ve Oğlum” which was a huge success he was telling us about a man who doesn’t have much time left to live so goes to his home village to entrust his son to his father. In his next movie ULAK / MESSENGERS, he was into a very epic story about a story-teller who wanders from one village to another to tell a story about a mystic messenger. Then came a bohemian love story, “Issız Adam – Alone.”
And in his last movie, he tells us a story of a loser, who lives with his mother at the age of 30 something. Unfortunately, his mother is a true nut case who hasn’t stepped out of the house for very long years. She is full of paranoid conspiracy theories and she refuses any normal interaction with anybody else but her son. So, our guy Egemen is entrapped in a very lonely life, and his only chance to come closer to an ordinary life is his job as an office boy in a PR company.
Throughout the all movie, you expect things to get weirder, as you would expect in a loser movie, or in any movie as a matter of fact. But as I told you earlier, this is not Cagan Irmak’s style, and he doesn’t do more than masterfully telling us about these people and their world. As the story develops in its slow pace, you get familiar with the world of Egemen, this poor loser, and really wish that he decides to make something for his own fake for a change.
And he does. And at the end of the movie, the story suddenly makes it move, and strikes you hard. I will not tell you what this turning point is, but I can assure you that it is as powerful as you would expect to see in a Cagan Irmak movie.
