Baskin
|Turkish writer/director Can Evrenol is no stranger to Glasgow Film Festival’s FrightFest, experiencing the weekend horror strand first as an attendee then with the original version of Baskin as one of the shorts screened at the event, and now as the creator of the feature version of that same twisted tale.
Screening on the evening of Saturday 27th February at the Glasgow Film Theatre, Evrenol was on hand to introduce what he described as “a low budget art film disguised as a horror film, a crazy puzzle,” but that was insufficient to prepare the audience for what would follow over the next two hours as the film unfolded and he returned to the stage to talk about the audacious production and answer the many questions which arose from the collective experience.
It opens simply enough, a child wandering through a darkened house, the flickering static of the television throwing shadows on the wall, a flashback to a childhood memory or possible a dream, noises beyond the door, and of something else, a presence, lurking just out of sight.
In a greasy diner, five policemen engage in banter as the meat cooks, senior officer Remzi (Ergun Kuyucu), Arda (Görkem Kasal), Yavuz (Muharrem Bayrak), Apo (Fatih Dokgöz) and Seyfi (Sabahattin Yakut). While they joke amongst themselves, vulgar confessionals and boasts, nobody else is allowed to join their closed cameraderie, the attempt of the kitchen assistant being met with violence; despite their badges and sworn duty, these are not nice men.
In the bathroom, where a frog crouches in the soap dish, Seyfi panics, but he says he’s good to go when a call comes in from nearby Inceagac. Soon they are lost on the backroads and communication with headquarters are down; Yavuz sees something on the road, a naked man, and he swerves, but something impacts the van even as it plunges into the river.
Pulled from the water, the beggars by the riverside laugh at them even as they gather frogs and place them in overflowing, squirming buckets. Making their way to their destination, the old police station from the Ottoman days, long abandoned, they find candles and blood spatters, ritual symbols and anatomical drawings of bizarre organisms, bodies in cages, a subterranean slaughterhouse of blindfolded butchers.
“On a night like this when doors are open and realms unite, Hell is not a place you go,” they are told by their captors. “You carry Hell with you all the time. We are your humble companions on the road you chose.” And so at this crossroads begins the maiming, mutilation and systematic degradation of each of the men, overseen by Baba (Mehmet Cerrahoglu), “the Father,” and his tribe of savages, the stripping of the symbolic protection of their uniforms only the first step of their emasculation.
Recalling the lurid colours of Argento or the film poster art of the late, great Bob Peake, the blue background wash with the foreground picked out in red highlights, or a bucket of entrails with a blue highlight, the colour scheme is bold and vivid, announcing that this is phantasmagoria rather than reality.
In a flashback bookended by surreal images, first a vast, godlike hand pulling him from the water and then blood spilling across the table where he sits with Remzi, his guardian since the death of his uncle, blood swirling down the walls and filling the room, Arda talks about dreams and death and premonitions. “It’s like I’m still dreaming.”
An unresolvable Möbius, Baskin is an experience, physical and emotional, rather than a narrative for analysis and understanding, at times almost overpowering and one which many will not be able to endure. It is less that Evenrol is interested in pushing boundaries as he seems to have no concept of them in the first place; if he can imagine it, it is depicted onscreen without any hesitation between the mind and the camera.
Perhaps intended as an test of endurance, Evenrol’s cast and crew are as unflinching in their commitment and dedication as he, not only the five officers lined up for sacrifice but the savages, played by a local LGBT performance troupe who will be no strangers to controversy in the officially secular but largely Muslim Turkey, led by Cerrahoglu, a former car park attendant who was cast for his physical appearance caused by a congenital skin condition.
As it increasingly tends towards a glorification of pain and violation of flesh, Hellraiser without the mechanics of a Lemarchand Box to support the tenuous story, it does tend towards the indulgence of nastiness without purpose, but Evenrol has demonstrated without question his ability to capture the attention of an audience, shocking, amazing and appalling them, which bodes well for his next proposed project, his first English language feature which will instead focus on female energy.
Baskin has been picked up for distribution in various international territories and will be released in the US on 30th March via IFC Midnight