Its phantasmagorical visuals and offbeat rhythms notwithstanding, Baskin is a weird movie. It’s an independent Turkish horror-fantasy film (when’s the last time you saw one of those?) that comes courtesy of first-time filmmaker Can Evrenol; it’s also among the most relentlessly gruesome films to come around in some time, veritable red meat for midnight movie hounds on the constant prowl for the latest and greatest in obscure, ultraviolent oddities. But spend enough time with the film, and it’s pretty clear that despite its assorted eccentricities and relentless pursuit of the perfectly orchestrated stomach-churning set pieces, Baskin is short on ideas. The film, as beautiful as it is ugly, is filled with stylistic elegance and nightmarish scenarios that certainly look like something but don’t feel like much of anything, creating a sense of stasis that’s entirely odd; it’s weird to feel so unmoved by such striking imagery.
Evrenol has clearly been reared on a steady diet of American genre cinema, and like all so many debut directors either unsure of or still searching for their own voice, he too readily relies on the vocabulary of others. Quentin Tarantino and David Lynch are chief among his go-tos, and films like A Nightmare on Elm Street and Hellraiser are quoted throughout; there’s even a fair bit of Dario Argento and the Coffin Joe series, just for good measure. This is all entertaining enough as an elaborate game of Film Reference Bingo, and Evrenol is certainly a quality imitator, but frustration quickly sets in when you realize that he’s squandering what appears to be some considerable talent.
Like Tarantino, Evrenol favors a slow burn. The film begins with a child being tormented by a ghoulish appendage after he sneaks out of bed to spy on his mother having sex in the next room. Bathed in Suspiria-red and scored with some Carpenter-esque synths that are heard throughout the film, the scene instantly cuts to a group of hardboiled police officers shooting the shit in an empty restaurant late at night. How the two scenes connect isn’t immediately disclosed, and Evrenol spends so much time on the cops’ blithe blabbering that you’re sort of fooled into thinking you’re in a different movie. But when Evrenol finally makes the connection, enough has transpired that the effect is genuinely disorienting, and it’s hard to tell which way is up. A distress call from another unit leads the officers to the literal gates of hell, where a rural cult practices weird sex acts and indulges in barbaric violence (usually at the same time), but how we got there is anyone’s guess. If nothing else, Evrenol succeeds in placing us within a living nightmare.
For the last half hour or so, the director virtually abandons the film’s story and focuses almost entirely on these sadistic rituals, which are inflicted upon each cop in a way that ties to past trauma, hidden shame and the cult’s amorphous promise of oneness with the beyond and such. Like the cult item A Serbian Film, Baskin basically devolves into a game of chicken with itself, following one ludicrously violent moment with another ludicrously violent moment until it all just kind of stops. Along the way, Evrenol seemingly forgets about stuff like theme and character development, and though a sense of narrative abandonment rings true to the film’s wacko dream logic, it doesn’t make the carnage any more endurable, let alone enjoyable. Through it all, though, Baskin retains its visual elegance, resulting in an uncomfortably enjoyable incongruity between form and content. It’s a hard film to like, but a difficult one to deny.