By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas.
The idea of making a truly dark revenge film at heart, in this day and age of global political-correctness-vs.-fascism, felt like the right thing to do (especially) if you are a true genre fan/filmmaker.”
– Can Evrenol
Going back at least to Metin Erksan’s classic The Well (Kuyu, 1968), the combination of violence against women – especially with a sexual dimension – and vengeance have a long history in Turkish cinema. Yet while not as well known in the west at least, Tunç Basaran’s extraordinary The Great Hate (Büyük kin, 1967) predated The Well by a year, an astonishing film which has largely gone ignored in rape-revenge film history, despite establishing the formula many years before revered western exploitation films like Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left (1972), and Meir Zarchi’s I Spit on Your Grave (1978) and Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45 (1981).
In the hands of Turkish genre cinema savant Can Evrenol, the traditional rape-revenge film formula is given a thoughtful twist his latest feature Saýara, a blood-soaked, visceral revenge film that centers women and their fight for empowerment without surrendering to reductive two-dimensional girl boss cliches. Ever since his 2015 powerhouse feature debut Baskin – adapted from his 2013 short of the same name – Evrenol has blended his extraordinary capacity for no-holds-barred stylistic excess with complex moral universes and portraits of characters who defy simple explanations.
Following its remarkable title character (played by Duygu Kocabiyik), Saýara follows a young woman who works quietly as a janitor at a gym where her sister is having an affair with the married owner. Saýara uses her access to the gym to discreetly keep up her physical self defence training taught to her from her beloved late father, skills she finds a new focus for when a series of shocking events lead her on a one-woman search for justice when political and police corruption fail to satisfactorily provide it.
Can kindly spoke to me about Saýara in the following interview (contains spoilers).
I was struck by just how frequently the film includes images of the Turkish flag, which really underscored very powerfully just how strong the geopolitical context of the film is.
It’s just something I find myself doing ever since my first short horror film The Chest (2008) – which you can find on my website. Turks love their flag. It’s just how it is here. It’s less about making a socio-political point – which it is – than it’s about making the art direction authentic.
Also, there’s a huge gap between the political arthouse scene and the perception of genre movies in this country. Placing these little genuine Turkish props – be it the flag, or a Turkish celebrity poster in the background – in a genre film, immediately makes the film stand out. Because there are no other films like that. Genre cinema and “serious” cinema are worlds apart in my country. And I hate that.
Saýara at its core is about the insidiousness of a patriarchy driven by a privileged elite, and in this sense it feels like a very global and very contemporary story, despite its cultural specificity. How do you see the Saýara’s story speaking to the world beyond Turkey right now?
I watched Ali Abbasi’s Holy Spider the other day, and I was blown away! I loved it. Then I read a comment online that goes “Holy Spider is not about a serial killer individual, but a serial killer society”. I think in that sense, Saýara, is a distant cousin to Holy Spider. I wanted Saýara to reflect how it feels when you put your head in the pillow at night under the burdening shadow of all the hashtags about femicides and politically connected murders in this country. I wanted Saýara to reflect my Twitter timeline, if you will. So your questions hits the spot.
Also the idea of making a truly dark revenge film at heart, in this day and age of global political-correctness-vs.-fascism, felt like the right thing to do. Businesswise, it’s like shooting your own foot from the get go, amidst the monopoly of safe-corporate-digital-platform-studio-product dominated industry. But it’s the right thing to do if you are a true genre fan/filmmaker. I hope, in time, Saýara will reach a wider audience, and is appreciated as a transgressive cult movie.
Looking at both Saýara and Bariş’s families, there’s a very strong throughline in the film about how in both families’ taste and capacity for violence is almost genetic, like something inherited and handed down from generation to generation.
Turkey is a land of blood feuds. It’s where I was born and raised. Although I had quite a privileged, very happy and healthy childhood, you feed from your country’s environment and its history. And you need to enjoy rolling with the punch if you want to maintain your sanity. It goes back to putting your head on the pillow at night with that nightmare of a Twitter timeline which takes place in the very land you live in. It becomes standard and the worst thing is to get used to this hopelessness. They say this is the fate of the Middle East.
One almost feels a sense of fucked-up pride in this hopelessness, cause that’s the only pride you can get your hands onto. I wanted to carry this dark pride – not necessarily my own, but my country’s, and many other countries’ – to my film.
So that’s why Saýara and her sister being immigrants, but very integrated ones, felt like the right way to go.
One of the things that struck me most immediately about Saýara was how it resisted the typical idea you see in these kind of women-centered revenge stories (especially about rape and other kinds of gendered violence) that violence against women sort of magically makes women feminists: that they are meek, but by being on the receiving end of male violence they sort of overnight become these almost ridiculously strong femme fatale warrior women. I was really impressed that you gave Saýara a lot more depth than that.
I love the trope of baddies running into greater evil. It was the main drive of my feature debut Baskin, too. I have loved it ever since I read HG Wells’ “The War of The Worlds” at a very young age. So Saýara had to be badder than the Turkish politically connected spoiled rich kids.
Just like you underline in your question, Saýara is more than an anti-hero, she’s a born-villain, who has repressed her dark nature all her life.
Every avenging hero has a mentor, a voice of reason. From Mr. Miyagi and Daniel San, to Luke and ObiWan. But in this film, Saýara’s mentor is her deep-state, killing-machine father. I wanted to tell the story of a female Keyser Soze; Keyser Soze’s daughter. The origin story of the villain of The Usual Suspects (1995) really stayed with me over the years. Keyser Söze’s origin story was equally dark and romantic. The aspect of killing your own loved ones as the first step to your journey of revenge. Just poetic darkness. And if you remember; Keyser Söze is Turkish.
The casting of Duygu Kocabiyik as Saýara is obviously so essential to the film, she has such incredible screen presence – she reminded me a lot of Zoe Tamerlis in Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45.
I wanted to have a genuine Turkmen or Central Asian immigrant woman for this role, who had the experience of martial arts or body flexibility. It was a hard job, but not impossible. But only when I met Duygu, I remembered that a good actor with the right face, attitude, and dedication, is better than the real thing, even. Dedication is the key here.
Many people who watch the trailer or see the poster ask me if the lead is actually a foreign actress. It’s priceless. I have to thank my casting director Ezgi Karaoz for that. She’s the go-to person if you’re looking for a foreign looking cast in Turkish TV. It’s funny how idealist DIY arthouse filmmaking go hand in hand with the TV industry sometimes.
Duygu was born for this role. The gods of grindhouse cinema (whatever remains of them lately) blessed us with Duygu. I didn’t even talk so much with her on set. She was a natural. I just directed her to play less with her body and more with her eyes, maybe. But she didn’t even need my guidance most of the time, despite her not being a cinema person at all. It was her first major role in anything really. During the pre-production, she attended jiu jitsu classes with me and my coach trained her specifically for the choreography of her fight scenes. She already had the right body type, the flexibility and the shoulders and everything. After training more than a month with our coach Ozdemir Kizilkan, she looked like an angel of death when she switched it on.
Also during the pre-production I wanted to divert my cast away from the world of digital platforms and TV series as much as I could. We gathered in my house and watched True Romance (1993), 8MM (1999) and the 1985 Hong Kong action film Yes, Madam to get into the spirit of making an actual honest film from the heart.
Turkey is a land of blood feuds…. One almost feels a sense of fucked-up pride in this hopelessness, cause that’s the only pride you can get your hands onto.”
I was also impressed with the casting of young Saýara, and the on-screen spark between her and the man who plays her father was very palpable. In a lot of films these sort of backstories are pretty token, but here it feels so absolutely essential to the heart of the film and these two actors in particular seem to do a lot of heavy lifting, despite being completely distinct from the contemporary part of the story.
I have a big smile on my face when reading this because those scenes were the most difficult scenes for me and the crew. We had time and location restraints and it was not possible to rehearse enough with these two actors in particular. So I ended up cutting out most of the talky bits from the flashback scenes. The result was; less is better. There’s plenty of editing magic in those flashbacks, but also I have to say that both those actors have an “actor animal” in them. If they are ever trained with the right cinema people, they have the potential to be amazing.
My starting point for the father-daughter relationship was this crazy rare martial-arts called Kinatay (2009). Sometimes I spend too much time on YouTube watching martial arts related stuff. MMA is my second biggest hobby after cinema. I am fascinated with the weird and the extremes. So one day on YouTube, I stumbled on this thing called kinomutay; the art of biting and eye-gouging!
I was immediately hooked. The sensei was teaching how to freeze minced meat wrapped in a plastic bag, to practice biting on it. Biting sideways is the way to go, they say. It was a moment of revelation for me. There’s no way you can have the right crew and the stunt team to have the spinning back kicks, or flips or The Raid type of amazing action in this part of the world. That type of know-how is still beyond my reach unfortunately. But – oh my god – with jiu jitsu choreography, topped with this kinomutay madness, I could make a martial arts movie like no other! That was my big motivation and kick in the butt to start writing Saýara.
I was also hugely impressed by Özgül Kosar and her performance as Saýara’s older sister, Yonja. The key scene where she is assaulted and killed is so complex, I was particularly struck by how authentically Yonja kept trying to maintain a sense of autonomy and control over the situation, even if it meant submitting to acts that were very clearly intended to diminish her autonomy – film so often tries to remove this nuance when it comes to depictions of violence against women (especially sexual violence), so this especially really stood out to me. Its a very nuanced scene; her death feels inevitable, she is clearly under real threat and experiencing horrific acts of sexual torture, yet right to the end she is in survival mode, trying to play it cool, trying to play the tough girl and acting like none of this is out of the ordinary.
I love her! Both the actress and the character. We wanted to portray a victim who doesn’t accept the role of being the victim to the bitter end. So much so that her attitude may be the very reason things escalate to this level. But it’s not her fault. And that’s all it matters. I love Yonja so much! I wanted to break my own heart to the max while writing and editing her death scene. Tarantino says that your film should be so personal that you should be a little embarrassed to show it to a live audience. Saýara’s sister’s death scene is just that for me. She’s the slut in me, in the best possible way of the word. She’s the slut in anybody who gives the middle finger to the toxic masculinity society here. And believe me that term is getting over-used and you truly understand the level of it when you come to a country like Turkey. I wanted this film to poke a stick in that core.
If you think about it, those guys didn’t even plan to murder her. They wanted to degrade her, and ultimately intimidate her. But it was Yonja that called for death once they drew first blood. She’s a vigilante in her own right. She’sSaýara’s big sister after all. It’s not so much even that she stabs the guy with a pair of scissors, but swears at his family. Swearing at one’s family is the ultimate sin here. And that says a lot about a society.
And maybe you have already noticed, that whole scene was inspired from the Patricia Arquette vs. James Gandolfini sequence in True Romance. That scene brings tears to my eyes every time I revisit it. And I thought that if I really want to go dark with my film, I’ll reimagine that scene, but with no miracle comeback at the end.
Yet this scene caused many festivals and distributors to reject screening Saýara. From Frightfest to Sitges, Fantastic Fest to Shudder. The gates of genre and transgressive cinema. The world is changing.
There’s something deeply satisfying in the body count structure of the film’s climactic revenge component as Saýara works her way through the men responsible, but again I was very impressed that while there were degrees of culpability, there was no question in her mind that they were all culpable. This in a sense recalls very different films like The Accused with Jodie Foster, where the men who looked on and did nothing were ultimately considered just as guilty as the men who actually raped her.
I think the offbeat body count structure almost makes Saýara an anti-revenge film. The kills in Saýara do not follow a pattern of step by step satisfaction, but rather the film sinks in a quagmire of helplessness and random rage, as Saýara rolls down her path of violence.
I was 14 or 15 when I watched Mad Max (1979) on VHS. It was easily the most cruel film I’ve seen to that day, but what really struck with me was how unceremonious the death of the main villain was, while the less guilty henchmen, who didn’t even want to kill Max’s friend in the first place, was punished so mercilessly by Max. It was this very lack of balance in the punishment coming from the anti-hero that made me feel that the world of Mad Max is more unpredictable and darker than any other dystopia.
So looking back at it today, some 25 years later, I was probably subconsciously taking a page out of George Miller’s book, when I was writing the death of those around Barış getting it worse than him. A friend of mine joked after one of the premieres that by the time Saýara reaches the first bad guy who had actually anything to do with the crime at hand, she had already killed half the cast.
I think this randomness in Saýara’s retribution creates a villainous atmosphere, rather than a villain; a world where everybody is guilty. And I hope this paints a bigger picture where – just like Holy Spider being a film about a serial killer society – Saýara is a film about the cruelty of a whole society.
In terms of the look of the film, I was struck by just how unusual it is stylistically for this kind of movie. The muted color palette is very beautiful and very consistent all the way throughout, so different from the usual kind of aggressive ‘pop’ of color we so often get with these kinds of films. Even moreso, there was obviously a very deliberate decision to work with a very shallow depth of field and keep the background largely out of focus.
Saýara is a low-key action movie. I’d like to think of it as a dogma horror action movie. What I was lacking in terms of stunts and scale for an action movie, I gave it the bleakest and most suffocating cinematography I could, to go hand in hand with such a script. From the moment I was writing the first draft, I had such movies in mind as Snowtown (2011), Kinatay (2009), Pusher 3 (2005), Gummo (1997), Julien Donkey Boy (1999) and maybe a bit of Irreversible (2002) too. I wanted it to feel darker than a Korean revenge flick that I love, I Saw The Devil (2010), and look like a 90’s Tartan-label European crime movie.
Our cinematographer was Umut Turan, who had no prior feature or short film experience before Saýara. I can’t be more proud of him. I knew he was the right person for the job, as he really dug what I wanted to go for, and wasn’t reserved at all to go as punk and as off-beat as he could with the camera and the depth of field, and whatnot…
I wanted the tranquil scenes to feel uneasy like Justin Kurzel’s Snowtown with off-centered framing and voyeuristic blocking. And as for the movement and light, I had Winding Refn’s Pusher movies in mind.
I have to give a huge thank you to our gaffer Karl Andre Bru, my amazing colorist Andy Minuth, and the one and only Fred S. Hana who helped me with his advice. I was so lucky to have a team of true genre-fan artists which is unfortunately very rare in this part of the world. It was maybe the most like-minded technical crew I ever had the chance to bring together.
Also, I think the music of Saýara plays a big factor in it feeling like a horror film, too. Volkan Akaalp did a tremendous job there, with his references ranging from Turcic Central Asian vibe, to the soundtracks of the New French Extremity.
I’ve been a fan of your work right back to Baskin, and while I am struck by the fact that each of your films feel (and look) very different to the last, they also have a distinct “Evrenol” vibe to them. What do you see as the throughline in your work? Where to from here?
So far I have been super lucky to be able to keep it as a passion project only career. It is my hobby really more than anything else. I’ve never made real money off these films. Ever since I was a film student, I was most inspired by low-budget auteur cult films which found a second life much later. So I’m hoping my films will one day have a similar journey. Otherwise I would have quit a long time ago.
I’m only doing it if I have total control over the script, the shoot, the editing and sound and color too. That means I have to work within a certain DIY low-budget framework. But even if I had much more money I think I would make more films, rather than bigger films. I love the creativity and freedom an auteur B-movie brings to the table. In that sense, Takashi Miike is a fair idol to have, I’d say.
I try to make each film feel like a debut film. I want them to be different genres, with different moods – but always a bit on the dark and weird side. I would never be excited to make a film that feels like a studio product.
Each time, it’s a different crazy story of how it gets the greenlight, and each time I find a new financier. That’s the hard part.
After Saýara I’ve been very lucky with my new project. This time it’s a remake – a reworking if you will. An insanely dark comedy. Based on the maniac film of Caye Casas’ The Coffee Table (2022), it’s titled The Turkish Coffee Table. Yes, it is as weird and surprising as it sounds! Apart from being bloodier than the original, I can say that after Saýara, I thought no other film could be closer to my heart, but again with The Turkish Coffee Table I had a divine experience. I can’t wait to share it with the world.
Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, a contributing editor to Film International, is a film critic from Melbourne, Australia, who frequently contributes to Fangoria and has published widely on cult, horror and exploitation film including The Giallo Canvas: Art, Excess and Horror Cinema (McFarland, 2021), Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study (McFarland, 2011) and the 2021 updated second edition of the same name, Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality (McFarland, 2015), the single-film focused monographs Suspiria (Auteur, 2016), Ms. 45 (Columbia University Press, 2017) and The Hitcher (Arrow Books, 2018), and two Bram Stoker Award nominated books, Masks in Horror Cinema: Eyes Without Faces (University of Wales Press, 2019) and 1000 Women in Horror (BearManor Media, 2020). She is also the co-editor, with Dean Brandum, of ReFocus: The Films of Elaine May (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), Wonderland (Thames & Hudson, 2018) on Alice in Wonderland in film, co-edited with Emma McRae, and Strickland: The Analogues of Peter Strickland (2020) and Cattet & Forzani: The Strange Films of Cattet & Forzani (2018), both co-edited with John Edmond and published by the Queensland Film Festival. Alexandra is on the advisory board of the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies, and a member of the Alliance of Women Film Journalists.