BASKIN (2015 - Turkish)

Studio:       IFC Midnight
Director:    Can Evrenol
Writer:       Can Evrenol, Cem Ozuduru, Ogulcan Eren Akay, Ercin Sadikoglu
Producer:  Mo Film
Stars:     Gorkem Kasal, Ergun Kuyucu, Muharrem Bayrak, Mehmet Fatih Dokgoz, Sabahattin Yakut, Mehmet Cerrahoglu

Review Score:

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Summary:

Five Turkish police officers enter an inescapable nightmare after disturbing a dark ritual in an abandoned building.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

As a boy, Arda is haunted by a vision of a creature stalking him in his parents’ house during the night.

As an adult, Arda works as a police officer under his boss Remzi, who swore an oath to Arda’s uncle to protect Arda. Remzi and Arda engage in salacious conversation at a restaurant with fellow officers Yavuz, Apo, and Seyfi. Yavuz starts a fight with a boy working at the restaurant after the boy laughs at Yuvuz’s story about having sex with a transvestite prostitute. Seyfi is found screaming in a bathroom stall after experiencing a nightmarish vision.

The men are called to back up officers in Inceagac, a neighborhood known for rumors of strange activity. Seyfi is startled by a bloody figure appearing suddenly in the road and drives their police van into the water.

Arda and Remzi are inexplicably back at the restaurant. Arda tells Remzi about the death of his childhood friend Coskun, who became the figure that appeared to him as a boy. Remzi instructs Arda to observe a robed figure stalking them. Arda suddenly begins bleeding. Arda drowns in the liquid from his vision and is then pulled from the water surrounding the van.

The policemen encounter a tribe of frog hunters before being led to an abandoned police station with a police car out front. Inside, the men find an entranced officer banging his head bloody against a wall. Arda, Remzi, Yavuz, and Apo continue descending further into the building to investigate. Seyfi is abducted by a group of half-naked cultists.

Arda, Remzi, Yavuz, and Apo find a room where cultists are engaged in a ritualistic orgy. Other bodies are being dismembered. Apo is hit over his head with a sledgehammer. Yavuz is captured. Arda and Remzi become separated while fleeing.

Arda encounters himself as a child back in his parents’ house. He and Remzi are then back in the restaurant again. Remzi tells Arda that they were not called as backup, but they were instead summoned.

Remzi and Arda regain consciousness to find themselves chained alongside Yavuz and Apo. Baba, the high priest also referred to as “The Father,” descends into the room as the cult’s ritual continues. Baba cuts open Apo and pulls out his intestines. He then stabs out Yavuz’s eyes.

A chained woman wearing a bloody animal skull mask is released. Baba and a henchman force Yavuz to have sex with her. Disappointed by Yavuz, Baba makes him collapse and a tarantula crawls from Yavuz’s mouth. A short time later, the woman gives birth to an inanimate skeleton hybrid.

Baba thanks Remzi for watching over Arda. Baba then slits Remzi’s throat and bathes in his blood.

Arda is returned to the restaurant again. There, he finds Remzi on the floor dying from his neck wound. As Baba approaches, Remzi spits out a key that Arda takes and thrusts into the keyhole tattoo on Baba’s forehead. Baba collapses and Arda beats him to death with his footstool. Covered in blood, Arda escapes the building, but is hit in the road by the police van driven by Seyfi.

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Review:

After catching the 2013 short film “Baskin,” Eli Roth contacted Turkish filmmaker Can Evrenol and asked if he had a script for a feature-length version of the story.  Evrenol claimed he did, but it would take 10 days to translate.  He and three co-writers then hunkered down for eight days to pound out said screenplay, translated it in two, and turned Evrenol’s little white lie into a half-truth sprinting from first draft to final cut in just four months.

“Baskin” pinged the radars of many genre fans dialed into festival circuit buzz during the latter half of 2015.  Following a reportedly raucous debut during TIFF’s Midnight Madness, the movie continued wowing and wooing at Fantastic Fest and Sitges.  By the time it returned to the U.S. for AFI Fest, “Baskin” racked up enough championing cheers for the title to become synonymous with “I have to see this for myself” horror instead of only the first half of an ice cream chain name.

No doubt about it, the movie demands to be noticed.  “Baskin” is devilish, dirty, grim, gritty, bloody, brutal, violent, and at times, repulsive.  Yet seeing those adjectives up on the screen at AFI Fest, a festival with only three Midnight movies in a lineup otherwise heavy on arthouse indies and celebrity-attended galas, I couldn’t help but think its inclusion was based on a traditional festival programmer considering its content to be culturally subversive strictly because it comes from Turkey and has subtitles.

If the film were set in America and filmed in English, mainstream media and conservative critics would dismiss it as depraved “torture porn” despite having an artier aesthetic than most movies in that category.  “Baskin” is interesting to a degree, but this is a case where overseas origins provide an imaginary edge of avant-garde exoticness the movie doesn’t fully possess.

“Baskin” is the story of a Turkish police team caught in a possible purgatory when called to a crime scene in a rural neighborhood known for rumors of occult activity.  There, they descend into a hellish nightmare involving blood-soaked orgies, dismemberment, mutilation, and more satanic imagery than a King Diamond concert.

Director and co-writer Can Evrenol explained in a post-screening Q&A that the police officers are not being punished for any particular crimes and are meant to relate as a “this could happen to anyone” experience.  They were written to be immature and uneducated.  There is a definite lost in translation element to this intention as the five men are introduced in a scene where they share in a story of sex with a transvestite prostitute before going all “Goodfellas” Joe Pesci on a boy who chuckles along with them.  Evrenol addressed their confusing characterization by mentioning that the Canadian audience at TIFF asked why the men were portrayed as “dickheads” while a Turkish crowd applauded the apparent hilarity in their buffoonish behavior.  If you’re of North American descent, particularly given current climates regarding perception of poor police behavior, expect to fall on the “dickheads” side of how to take the fivesome.

Surviving the subdued dreaminess of the film’s quieter first two acts becomes additionally taxing due to this dislike for the loudmouth quintet.  A lot happens in “Baskin” without really arriving anywhere and poor protagonists don’t punch the ticket of anyone eager to take the trip into this crimson-colored vision of “The Twilight Zone.”

Once act three kicks off with the cops inadvertently interrupting a bonkers Black Mass, “Baskin” begins buttering its bread in earnest, spreading on splatter with thick-cut pats of disemboweled entrails, severed limbs, and forced sex involving a woman wearing an animal skull.  Even those with an inclination towards gagging can become entranced by the presence of Mehmet Cerrahoglu as the cult’s diminutive High Priest.  Cerrahoglu’s physicality and balletic movements mesmerize in a manner commanding eyes to come back to the screen after initially turning away in disgust.

For as spellbinding as the climax is however, finding compelling context motivating this superficial appeal is a challenge.  Remembering that “Baskin” began life as an 11-minute movie, it appears even more like an extension of a limited idea without legs to impress on a level other than appearance.

“Baskin” is a great-looking movie made with extraordinary attention to atmosphere full of imagery disturbing for being haunting or alternatively grotesque.  The score hypnotizes with similarly inconsistent scalability, employing a moody “Silent Hill” motif in its music before burdening the climax with repeated and sustained bass rumbles (bommm… bommm… bommm…).

What these sights and sounds amount to other than a visually-arresting experience of variable value when it comes to horror entertainment or metaphoric meaning is open to interpretation.  Perhaps a possibly misguided film fest curator could better explain any substantive merit beyond being an occasionally intriguing foreign fright film.

Review Score:  60

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