The new Onar Films release of Kutlug Ataman’s 1993 debut film Karanlik Sular is about to force an awful lot of people to rethink their assumptions about Turkish genre film. While the country has built a rock solid reputation in the arthouses in recent years thanks to the work of auteurs such as Fatih Akin and Nuri Bilge Ceylan the country’s genre output has never shed the influence of the trash classics produced in the 1970s with no regard whatsoever for international copyright law, an era that produced legendarily bad knock offs of Star Wars, Spider-Man and Super Man created on the cheap. In many minds pulp is all Turkey is good for on the genre front and while there are many film makers there still more than happy to work that particular mine - with varying degrees of success - Ataman’s film is something entirely different. With a looping, elliptical structure and a reliance on an intuitive version of dream logic Ataman’s film is a hypnotic puzzle that both deserves and lives up to comparisons with Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive era David Lynch and it comes as no surprise that since this film’s release Ataman has built a sterling international reputation as a visual and video artist with his works commissioned and shown around the world. And yet despite the film’s quality and its creator’s pedigree this is one that would surely have slipped off into obscurity if not for this DVD release.Supposedly reconstructed from verbal recollections of a legendary lost text Karalik Sular is a film that resists easy synopsis and, indeed, is a film that would become much less if broken down into its component parts. This is a classic instance where the delivery is as important as the content, a prime example of film that exists as experience at least as much as it does as narrative. Religious conspiracy, possible mental illness, the restless dead, an eight hundred year old princess, an American researcher / hitman, a scroll that unlocks the secret of eternity but kills its reader in the process, and a mother’s quest for her supposedly dead son drive this unique spin on the vampire ethos. Thanks to the elements that make up the whole Karanlik Sular is most often classed as a horror film but that seems inaccurate as Ataman shows little inclination to scare his audience, rather he seeks to immerse them in a poem, a nightmare, a surreal fever-dream.The Istanbul of Ataman’s film is a magnificent city of decay - a world of crumbling buildings, labyrinthine catacombs and sprawling cemetaries. It is a world full of mist and shadow, a world of night club freak shows, dead languages and moonlit boat tours. It is a world where the rhythms are all just slightly off - a factor manipulated expertly by Ataman’s shifting between English and Turkish as the language of choice - and scenes melt from one into the next based on some obscure inner logic. It is a film ultimately about cultures meeting, melding, and consuming one another, a film about life in a world where traces of the dead simply refuse to fade away.Whether Ataman’s film deserves to be labeled a classic remains up for debate but it is certainly a significant film, one that deserves far, far more attention than it has received and Onar films are to be applauded for bringing it back from the grave. This comes strongly recommended.(Todd Brown - Twitch)
