Curator Watchlist
A patient, haunting procedural that turns a murder search into a meditation on guilt, class, masculinity, and the small humiliations of public life. It’s demanding and deliberately unhurried, but the craft, atmosphere, and layered conversations make it deeply rewarding.
Where to watch: Buy
Fri · 2h 43m
Director: Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Starring: Muhammet Uzuner, Yılmaz Erdoğan, Taner Birsel
A group of men lead a search for a victim of a murder to whom a suspect named Kenan and his mentally challenged brother confessed. However, the search is proving more difficult than expected as Kenan is fuzzy as to the body's location. As the group continues looking and the night begins dragging on, its members can't help but chat with each other about everyday life, as the conversations turn more and more serious, revealing their deeper secrets and profound stories.
Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Muhammet Uzuner, Yılmaz Erdoğan, Taner Birsel
A patient, haunting procedural that turns a murder search into a meditation on guilt, class, masculinity, and the small humiliations of public life. It’s demanding and deliberately unhurried, but the craft, atmosphere, and layered conversations make it deeply rewarding.
Nuri Bilge Ceylan turns a murder investigation into something far larger and stranger: a night-long drift through fatigue, bureaucracy, memory, and regret. The search for a body becomes a way to expose the private griefs and moral compromises of everyone involved, from police and doctors to the suspect himself.
What makes the film linger is its patience. It watches faces, pauses, landscapes, and small gestures with the same seriousness it gives to the case, letting ordinary conversation gradually open into something tragic and philosophical. The result is austere, but never empty.
This is not a crime film built on momentum. It is built on accumulation, and on the uneasy feeling that the real mystery is not where the body is, but what kind of life has led all these men to this point. For viewers willing to meet it on its own terms, it’s one of the most absorbing and accomplished films of its decade.
Lise (4.5★) · 1219 likes
There is a scene in this film, a background scene, that completely encapsulates the film for me. It is a scene of two shopkeepers judiciously sweeping the bits of sidewalk and road immediately in front of their place of business. In between the two sweepers lies a huge mound of sand. No matter how many times they sweep, within minutes any trace of their work will have disappeared.It will have made no difference. They keep sweeping. Nuri Bilge Ceylan… more
Ole Holgersen (5★) · 486 likes
This is my first meeting with a Nuri Bilge Ceylan film, and I was not disappointed. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is a long, tiresome and difficult watch, and perhaps not for the restless, but it is a masterpiece, and the best of it's kind. Through the night, three cars carry a small group of men around in the rural surroundings of the Anatolian town Keskin, in search of a buried body. The group involves police officers, a doctor,… more
aleyna (5★) · 386 likes
Film boyunca ortada sadece bir cinayet varmış gibi bir algıya kapılıyorsunuz fakat aslında bir değil çok cinayet var; şöyle ki: Maktul’un eşi, eşinin ölmesine sebep olmuştur… Bunu, onu en yakın arkadaşıyla aldatarak yapmıştır. Savcı da eşini; yani bashettiği o güzel kadını aldatarak, onun ölümüne sebep olmuştur. Zanlı rolündeki Kenan, en yakın arkadaşını, söz konusu aldatma meselesi yüzünden öldürmüştür. Ölümler sadece fiziksel yok oluşla da gerçekleşmiyor; başka türlü ölümler de vardır filmde görülen: Ortada, babasının Kenan olduğu iddia edilen bir çocuk
Edgar Cochran ✝️🍋 (5★) · 257 likes
Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven. Matthew 19:14 The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? Jeremiah 17:9 These two Bible quotations, in my humble opinion, encapsulate the entire statement of Ceylan's new thought-provoking and mysterious crime story, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. Leaving the crime plot elements aside, which are just the engine of the story, the answers are… more
ogün (5★) · 251 likes
Türkiye'nin otopsisi
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A spare, enigmatic family drama with the same attention to silence, tension, and emotional undercurrents.
For its formal rigor, patience, and emphasis on mood over conventional narrative propulsion.
A slow-burn mystery that trades answers for ambiguity, class tension, and simmering dread.
guilt and moral compromise, bureaucracy and authority, male loneliness, death and burial, truth and confession, class and social hierarchy, rural isolation, everyday conversation as revelation
slow cinema, crime drama, existential, meditative, rural landscape, ensemble cast, psychological, moral ambiguity, night journey, art-house