Hesitation Wound

Selman Nacar's 2023 film screened in the Orizzonti section of the 80th Venice Film Festival. Tulin Ozen plays Canan, a lawyer defending Musa, who stands accused of killing his former employer. In the same days her mother lies in a coma, and most of the film takes place inside one day of moving between a hospital room, a corridor and a courtroom. Nacar leans two stories against each other: in one a family is asked to decide when a life ends, in the other a court is asked to decide how a life will be weighed. He does not turn this into a display of symmetry; Canan's decisions sit somewhere between professional ethics and exhaustion, and the film never states which one wins. The visual language is plain. Long takes, tight spaces, the courthouse and the hospital sharing the same kind of corridor. It is a Turkey, Spain, Romania and France co-production. Ozen's performance carries it; the smallest shift in her voice says what the script leaves unsaid. Who it's for: viewers who like legal drama built out of silence rather than gesture. Who it's not for: viewers expecting courtroom tension and a stirring closing speech; the court here is bureaucratic and tiring, deliberately so.