An unflinching look into the dark heart of ethnic hatred, Emin Alper’s Kurtuluş (or Salvation) speaks the language of a mystical horror-thriller in its pursuit of exposing real-world political violence. Set in a remote mountain village in eastern Turkey, and following a resurgent feud between fictitious Kurdish tribes, the film pulls no punches with its metaphors. It lays them out with lucid, unmistakable specifics that elevate what could have been merely symbolic into a searing reflection of the modern world — which the Berlinale jury saw fit to award the festival’s Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize.
There’s trouble brewing when we first meet our characters, in the isolated twin towns of Upper and Lower Pingan. Military patrols roam the hillside looking for terrorists as a larger armed conflict winds down, while the return of several formerly-displaced families to their old farms leads to arguments over land. Before we know it, we’re thrust into an existing clash whose details seem intentionally muddy. Who are these quarreling groups? Why do they hate each other? That they seem indistinguishable to outsiders is initially the point, but Salvation isn’t concerned with a didactic view of communal clashes in the vein of Star Trek’s alien races. Gradually, and then all at once, Alper immerses us on one side of this dynamic, on which he maintains a tight, unyielding focus until we’re practically implicated in its point of view.
The Hazeran clan, led by moderate, third-generation imam Ferit (Feyyaz Duman), sees itself as the caretakers of the land, and bristles at the thought of being seen as inferior to their returning brethren, the Bezari. Through expository conversations in the Hazeran mosque, we learn of Ferit’s relatively utopian view, as well as the simmering tensions he intends to quell, owing to growing financial frustrations. Chief among the dissenters happens to be Ferit’s older brother, the seemingly wise, white-bearded Mesut (Caner Cindoruk), whose quiet objections grow louder the more an aggrieved third party baying for blood — the serpentine factionalist Yilmaz (Berkay Ateş) — whispers in his ear.
You could trace a straight line between the Hazerans’ existing beliefs and stereotypes about the Bezari and their eventual escalations towards violence— the film is based in part on a horrifying real-world event — but the film’s unspooling is anything but straightforward. Despite occasional overt statements setting the stage, its characters’ gradual, monstrous evolutions are rooted in dreams and waking nightmares, beginning with Mesut hallucinating his pregnant wife Gülsüm (Özlem Taş) becoming sexually involved with an invisible specter. It’s a gap he’s more than willing to fill with an existing enemy, especially when an extremist woman in the village, Fatma (Naz Göktan) begins filling his head with rumors of Gülsüm’s infidelity when she was tending to a Bezari household.
Mesut is notably gentle towards anyone in his in-group, including and especially Yilmaz’s young son (Robin Aydin), whose bouts of sleepwalking and sleep-talking he begins to interpret as divine visions. Soon, every bit of sensory input, whether literal or fantastical, begins to re-shape his existing views on the Bezari, strengthening them until he breaks the mosque into factions, re-fashioning himself as a spiritual embodiment of twisted, divine justice.
All the while, Alper and cinematographers Ahmet Sesigürgil and Barış Aygen — who create an oppressive gas lamp atmosphere — seldom break away from Mesut’s close ups as his beliefs curdle and his convictions strengthen. Cindoruk’s performance is haunting and magnificent; his far-away gaze becomes practically hypnotic, enticing us towards the sensations underlying Mesut’s fanaticism, even if we won’t agree with his actual beliefs. Although the film features numerous visions in which the Bezari invade, its real horrors arrive in the form of Mesut’s intoxicating proclamations, and the congregation’s rhythmic motions when they chant and pray, in the vein of Sufi ritual. These are vile, vicious people stoking their own fears, but it’s hard not to be enraptured by the community they build, no matter its foundations.
That we rarely see the Bezari, except from a distance, is a key aesthetic point as well, forcefully tethering us to the Hazerans’ warped gaze as their fearmongering takes familiar forms. The Bezari, you see, are hateful, sneaky, violent, stupid, and lazy — oh, and they’re coming for our women, so we need to set up armed vigilante patrols. It’s the check-list used against persecuted minority groups throughout history, from modern Palestinians and Muslims in Modi’s India, to Jews in Nazi Germany and Black people in the Jim Crow south (and of course, the Kurds themselves, in many parts of Western Asia). It’s the same playbook with tilt-shifted details, and here, Alper zeroes in on not just the ferocity with which it’s embodying, but the underlying impulses that make it so easy for human beings to compartmentalize and justify any atrocities.
To intellectualize these ideas is one thing, but Alper aestheticizes them through the language of dreams, with frequent scenes of visions and supposed premonitions from which numerous characters wake up in fright. In most horror movies, depicting a threat only for it to turn out to have been part of a character’s subconscious may work once or twice, but it can be frustrating when deployed ad nauseam, since it zaps away the stakes. Not so here. The dreams we repeatedly see play out in Salvation, of coordinated infiltrations and supernatural fears, are those of the film’s ostensible monsters.
The line between sleep and waking blurs to the point that pretty much any scene could end with Mesut, Yilmaz or Fatma bolting upright in bed, and understanding this structure is key to never quite knowing whether what we’re seeing is real. Which is to say: even the remote possibility that it might be makes us complicit in believing that the Bezari, these “others” that we’ve never met, might suddenly interrupt the film with a violent incursion from the shadows.
The film’s crescendos are brutal and, unfortunately, bleakly inevitable, but that’s the thing about communal violence rooted in bigotry. Its worst outcomes don’t erupt from nowhere, and there are always people sounding the alarm bells, whose warnings are only heeded as real in retrospect. That Salvation charges toward this inevitability is both tragic and sickly thrilling, as Alper and his cast create a meaningful dramatic treatise on the “how” and “why” of massacres and genocides, offering an inside-out view of the wretched psychology that grants them permission. There are eerie, ghostly happenings throughout the film, but they exist not to be terrifying in and of themselves. Rather, their purpose is to grant us an intimate look at the nature of fear itself, its weaponization, and how it becomes a tool of the true terrors of which all human beings are capable. [4.5/5]
Salvation is currently playing as part of the Berlin International Film Festival. Visit the festival website for more information.
