Good Night's Sleep
Every film of intrigue requires a cryptic message. That's probably not true of all intrigue-driven films, but the motif seems to manifest often in cinema. It's a hook, a pattern, a lure for the audience to guide them through sometimes weird plots that may be hard to believe. In the case of a big Hollywood movie like The Da Vinci Code the message is right there in the title.
D@bbe, a Turkish horror film from 2006, also contains the message in the title, but unless you've seen the movie, the way it's printed makes it seem like a peculiar e-mail address. The film deals with a Koranic prophecy come to life in modern (2005) Turkey. Since the Internet is the new communication system, the supernatural comes through technology.
A man, Tarik, has missed work for a few days. His coworkers, worried about him, can't get ahold of him. Hande (Ebru Aykaç, a beautiful dark-haired actress whose big eyes work well for horror) rides the bus to Tarik's place, finds the apartment in a weird disheveled state, newspapers covering the walls, held there with black tape. He comes downstairs, calm but out of it. After desultory conversation, he returns upstairs, screams a lot. Hande finds him with a knife through his throat. Since no one else was around, it had to be suicide.
Strange violent suicides break out over Turkey, as they've been happening in the United States where a vast wave of suicides have occurred. Suleyman (Ümit Acar, a good actor, his performance impressed me) is a homicide detective assigned to the case, since it's so bizarre. Tarik left behind a videotape showing him going through what appears to be a psychotic episode, babbling and putting black tape on his walls. Suleyman, meanwhile, has intensely bad dreams about his wife who killed herself. Tarik's friend, Cem (Serder Özer), receives an e-mail, with disturbing picture attached, from Tarik three days after the latter's death. Cem's life gets scary, with nasty visions of dark figures, unsettling sounds, his computer acting as a transmitter of freaky shit he didn't summon.
Everyone in the film succumbs to the realization in the actual world of the prophecy of the Dabbe, an entity that will appear prior to the Apocalypse, a kind of messenger that commands the Jinni, who, in the film, come out of mirrors.
The cryptic message, 388@0, appears on Tarik's computer, puzzled over by the police. When Hande sees this in a mirror, it comes out as 0@88E, or, DABBE. A madman had shouted at a crime scene about the coming of Dabbe. Hande puts it together and probably later on wishes she had gotten rid of her computer and taken a no-tech vacation.
The subject matter has a familiarity to it. David Cronenberg's Videodrome deals with people obsessed with a television show, drawn more and more into a destructive spiral resulting in ruin.
Hasan Karacadag is a Turkish horror film director who's only forty-one years old, so he made D@bbe when he was twenty-eight or twenty-nine. His style is very good and creative. Images work well, whether in the horror vein, or just regular day and night moments experienced by the characters. He puts his camera high often, up by the ceiling with a wide angle lens, creating a strange perspective no human being would see unless looking at surveillance imagery. These images don't have the feel of surveillance videography, but rather a kind of alien perspective, appropriate to the subject matter of a prophecy come true.
The music and sound design of the film are also quite fine, working well with the images. The predominance of the color yellow, whether in the walls of interiors, or apartment houses, or a general filtered look outside of yellowness adds yet another element that I found increasingly alarming to look at. For me, good horror films are reliant on compelling atmosphere. This film has that, even if it does verge on "I've seen this kind of thing before," such as in The Prophecy trilogy and the Nightmare on Elm Street films.
Even so, I liked the film--it was a pleasure watching a movie from Turkey, my first ever from that country.
Vic Neptune
Every film of intrigue requires a cryptic message. That's probably not true of all intrigue-driven films, but the motif seems to manifest often in cinema. It's a hook, a pattern, a lure for the audience to guide them through sometimes weird plots that may be hard to believe. In the case of a big Hollywood movie like The Da Vinci Code the message is right there in the title.
D@bbe, a Turkish horror film from 2006, also contains the message in the title, but unless you've seen the movie, the way it's printed makes it seem like a peculiar e-mail address. The film deals with a Koranic prophecy come to life in modern (2005) Turkey. Since the Internet is the new communication system, the supernatural comes through technology.
A man, Tarik, has missed work for a few days. His coworkers, worried about him, can't get ahold of him. Hande (Ebru Aykaç, a beautiful dark-haired actress whose big eyes work well for horror) rides the bus to Tarik's place, finds the apartment in a weird disheveled state, newspapers covering the walls, held there with black tape. He comes downstairs, calm but out of it. After desultory conversation, he returns upstairs, screams a lot. Hande finds him with a knife through his throat. Since no one else was around, it had to be suicide.
Strange violent suicides break out over Turkey, as they've been happening in the United States where a vast wave of suicides have occurred. Suleyman (Ümit Acar, a good actor, his performance impressed me) is a homicide detective assigned to the case, since it's so bizarre. Tarik left behind a videotape showing him going through what appears to be a psychotic episode, babbling and putting black tape on his walls. Suleyman, meanwhile, has intensely bad dreams about his wife who killed herself. Tarik's friend, Cem (Serder Özer), receives an e-mail, with disturbing picture attached, from Tarik three days after the latter's death. Cem's life gets scary, with nasty visions of dark figures, unsettling sounds, his computer acting as a transmitter of freaky shit he didn't summon.
Everyone in the film succumbs to the realization in the actual world of the prophecy of the Dabbe, an entity that will appear prior to the Apocalypse, a kind of messenger that commands the Jinni, who, in the film, come out of mirrors.
The cryptic message, 388@0, appears on Tarik's computer, puzzled over by the police. When Hande sees this in a mirror, it comes out as 0@88E, or, DABBE. A madman had shouted at a crime scene about the coming of Dabbe. Hande puts it together and probably later on wishes she had gotten rid of her computer and taken a no-tech vacation.
The subject matter has a familiarity to it. David Cronenberg's Videodrome deals with people obsessed with a television show, drawn more and more into a destructive spiral resulting in ruin.
Hasan Karacadag is a Turkish horror film director who's only forty-one years old, so he made D@bbe when he was twenty-eight or twenty-nine. His style is very good and creative. Images work well, whether in the horror vein, or just regular day and night moments experienced by the characters. He puts his camera high often, up by the ceiling with a wide angle lens, creating a strange perspective no human being would see unless looking at surveillance imagery. These images don't have the feel of surveillance videography, but rather a kind of alien perspective, appropriate to the subject matter of a prophecy come true.
The music and sound design of the film are also quite fine, working well with the images. The predominance of the color yellow, whether in the walls of interiors, or apartment houses, or a general filtered look outside of yellowness adds yet another element that I found increasingly alarming to look at. For me, good horror films are reliant on compelling atmosphere. This film has that, even if it does verge on "I've seen this kind of thing before," such as in The Prophecy trilogy and the Nightmare on Elm Street films.
Even so, I liked the film--it was a pleasure watching a movie from Turkey, my first ever from that country.
Vic Neptune
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