A former theatre student with chronic mental health issues struggles to determine whether his infernal encounters are visitations from another plane or delusions that are a side effect of the medication he is taking in Turkish director Gurcan Keltek’s sophomore feature New Dawn Fades, which screened in the international competition at the Locarno Film Festival. This ambiguity may be a standard suspense hook, but there is nothing old hat about the potently atmospheric, sensorily immersive nightscape that Keltek makes of the vast edifices, waterways, mosques and rain-streaked cemeteries of Istanbul that Akin passes through as he tries to regain his existential bearings. In his debut feature Meteors, a docufiction hybrid much admired on the festival circuit in 2017, Keltek used the historical concurrence of a meteor shower with martial law and a brutal state crackdown on a Kurdish town in Turkey to bring a cosmic, poetic dimension to the collective processing of trauma and memory. New Dawn Fades echoes these themes but dives more spectacularly into the horror genre, unanchored from overt political references, even as citizens subsist in gloom, desperate for deliverance from their psychic pain.
Akin (a magnetic and intense Cem Yigit Uzumoglu) has had a number of hospital stays over the years but is out and living in the family home, a dimly lit wooden mansion of narrow staircases and drawn lace curtains. He’s taking the mood stabiliser lithium but feels mentally exhausted, and leaves the house mainly just for lone ventures to the mosque and other religious sites. He doesn’t speak much. Pressing himself against the wall of the lamp-filled Hagia Sophia while others pray, or overhearing chatter about the secret ancient cult of Mithraism, it’s as if he is trying to tune himself into a more mystical and sublime system of meaning outside himself, as he detects a presence that is detached from quotidian life. Dynamic, woozy camerawork takes us gliding and swooping through spaces, as if from the point of view of an otherworldly presence in flight (the gift of “new eyes” takes on a particularly sinister meaning later on.) A masterfully intricate, suggestive soundscape hums, taps, mutters and roars. The ominous, blanket noise of one troubled mind, it allows no silent repose, as the wind keeps up a commotion in the trees.
Tensions abound at home, where Akin’s mother contests his memory of his Serbian father as a murdering butcher, a deep wound of generational trauma we glimpse only as a brief hint. She disapproves, too, of a former fellow patient and friend of Akin’s, who stops by uninvited in the middle of the night, unkempt and unfed, and pulls out a crack pipe. Relatives and acquaintances want to help, but their methods — cupping the back, bloodletting with leeches, or guiding his breathing by candlelight — are either reluctantly met, or fail to bring the relief desired. The most his actual doctor can do is offer to bump up the lithium, in response to Akin admitting to meeting with devil-like creatures at the bus stop. As Akin spirals further into an obscure universe to which those around him don’t share access, its exact laws or contours remain as hazy as the twilight that much of the action plays out in (esoteric titles such as “Entrusted Body” and “Dream Weapon” that break up the film’s drift do little to elucidate things.) As the idea of “sign dreams” is introduced, in which beings take the shape of the mind that invites them in, we find ourselves in a film that may ultimately be about the outer reaches of the imagination, where cinema is created. But the deranged denouement on a ferry during a stormy sunset on the Bosphorous is so madcap and exhilarating, we can easily forget about searching for a precise interpretation.
Director, Screenwriter: Gurcan Keltek
Editing: Murat Gultekin, Semih Gulen
Cast: Cem Yigit Uzumoglu, Ayla Algan, Erol Babaoglu, Suzan Kardes, Dilan Duzguner, Gurkan Gedikli
Producer: Arda Ciltepe
Cinematographer: Peter Zeitlinger
Music: Son of Philip
Sound: Massimiliano Borghesi
Production Design: Yunus Emre Yurtseven, Meral Efe Yurtseven
Production companies: Vigo Film (Turkey), Slingshot Films (Italy), 29P Films (Netherlands), The StoryBay (Germany), Fidalgo Productions (Norway)
Sales: Heretic
Venue: Locarno (Concorso Internazionale)
In Turkish and Bosnian
130 minutes
