Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

On the surface, Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan's film is an extremely slow-moving police procedural that tells a very simple story in which a group of investigators drive aimlessly around the countryside in order to locate the corpse that a killer has confessed to burying, bring the body back to headquarters, and perform an autopsy on it. But even as it covers the details of each phase of the process with obsessive care—and an occasional touch of dark humor—the film gradually becomes an existential journey during which the characters reveal their innermost hopes and fears. The mood is overwhelmingly bleak, as one character cannot fathom the killer's depths of depravity, another expresses the view that we are all trivial specks in an unforgiving universe, and a third comes to suspect that his late wife might have committed suicide. And the film suggests that violence and tragedy are unending. For some viewers, this will be nothing more than a dilatory ramble through a dreary Anatolian landscape, but for others it will be a somber, sobering reflection on the realities of the human condition. Highly recommended. (F. Swietek)