YERALTI

INSIDE (YERALTI), 2012

Turkey | DCP, Color, 107’| Turkish

Cast: Engin Günaydın, Nergis Öztürk, Serhat Tutumluer, Nihal Yalçın, Murat Cemcir

In this film loosely adapted from Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground, Muharrem pressgangs his old friends into inviting him to dinner, no matter that he hates and is hated by them. The dinner starts off with a few harmless gibes and trivial shows of bravado; but as time wears on and heads become fuddled, the conversation progresses steadily into the inglorious past. Old grievances come tumbling out into an ugly showdown.As the night becomes charged with tears, anger and regret, the outrage spills onto the dark streets, into sleazy hotel rooms. Although they’re in league and he’s on his own, Muharrem has made up his mind. Either the filth is cleaned up that night or he dies. Otherwise he’ll never be rid of this sense of shame.

“Inside is a film in which humiliation (and the perverse pleasure derived from it) and a virtually ‘gourmet’, rat-like feeling of contemptiblenessare meticulously adapted to our day. (...) Another film might have wanted to pull its protagonist from out of the pit into which he had fallen. However, Inside is not about humaneness but the pit itself. I do not know of another film in Turkish cinema that spreads the ‘pit’ across the social perspective with such honesty, ardor, eagerness, irony, and artistic gusto.”– Fatih Özgüven