Fate

A Turkish drama. Musa is a clerk at customs. He lives with his mother, goes to work, comes home in the evening and feels nothing. This is not a crisis; it is simply his condition. His mother dies. Musa buries her and goes to work the next day. A woman at his office proposes marriage. He accepts; asked why, he has no answer. Then there is a murder. Musa has nothing to do with it but offers no defence. During questioning he does not say the things that would clear him, because he does not think saying them means anything. From there the film becomes a trial and a prison. Everyone waits for an explanation from him: the prosecutor, his wife, the manager, the guard. He gives none of them what they want. What the narrative is interested in is not crime but indifference: the film is not about a man rejecting the rules of society but about those rules meaning nothing to him. The source is Albert Camus's The Stranger. The adaptation moves the events to Istanbul and builds its own ending. Serdar Orçin plays Musa. Zeynep Tokuş and Demir Karahan are in the cast. Zeki Demirkubuz wrote and directed. The film is part of a pair he built around darkness. Who it is for: anyone who likes quiet, cold and bleak narratives. Who it is not for: anyone who wants to identify with a character; the film deliberately makes that impossible and its tone stays flat throughout.