New Netflix thriller will draw you in and take your breath away for 120 minutes
Turkish cinema has become a separate genre in cinema. The plots, always shrouded in the mist of any obscure event, made even more intense in the light of rocky mountains as far as the eye can see, tend to deviate from far from ordinary situations to arrive at stories that are somewhere between absurd and moving, and that is indeed Uluç Bayraktar’s intention in “10 Days of a Good Man”. The virtuous subject presented by Bayraktar tries to work around his failures, reinvents himself, fights his demons; but as if an unknown element hovered in the air, attracting human nature to inevitable disgrace, a cloud of inexplicable events surrounds him at first glance and forces him to adopt positions which he had until then considered unacceptable, a narrative game full of rhetoric acrobatics of this kind of film.
The director replaces the bucolic landscape of productions such as “Milagres Do Amor” (2019), by Mahsun Kırmızıgül, with the chaos of an Istanbul in constant social metamorphosis. Images like those of a dream, in neon blue – a resource that Bayraktar resorts to more than once during the two-hour projection – make the audience imagine that the script by Damla Serim and Mehmet Eroğlu will not go beyond innuendo about the daily life of Sadik Demir, the good man of the title. Sadik, a former lawyer who embarks on a bumpy career as a private detective, is the anti-hero of Eroğlu’s eponymous book, and much more than the figure always surrounded by palatable details in the author’s text, he makes his dismay at the world clear. . Strange, a bit marginal, Nejat Işler perfectly captures the not-so-obvious nuances of a very rich character. Sadik even looks like an ordinary man, but close to no one is ordinary, he talks to himself, drinks whiskey and milk with the same will and is attracted to wildly suspicious girls like Pinar, the young prostitute played by Ilayda Alisan. It is precisely in Pinar that Sadik’s slightly crazy search for Tevfik, another of the cursed types that Eroğlu’s pen brings to life, here played by Ata Artman. The protagonist’s warped essence matches this bleak universe he inhabits, full of damned souls like himself, and here what is told matters less than how it is told, retaining the noir leanings of the original text.
This work of Bayraktar confirms the tendency to reproduce all the stories of Sadik in the cinema and will have been the first in a trilogy, the second part of which, “10 Days of a Bad Man”, is scheduled to premiere on August 18, 2023. the ending gives even an idea of the continuity of the story, which is based on the structure of a saga that reveals the more cynical side of Sadik’s personality, a man who changes his name, temperament and habits at the whim of convenience.
Movie: 10 days of a good man
Direction: Uluç Bayraktar
Year: 2023
genres: Drama/Mystery/Thriller
Note: 8/10
