Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

Turkish writer-director Nuri Bilge Ceylan has made one masterpiece after another: Distant (2002); Winter Sleep (2014), The Wild Pear Tree (2018) and About Dry Grasses (2023) could only be counted among the best films of the past quarter century. He’s won multiple prizes at Cannes, including the Palme d’Or, Best Director, and the Grand Prix (twice).

Neither a fairytale, nor a Leonesque shoot-em-up, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is a somber, melancholy comedy about mortality, as well as a subtle, poignant murder mystery.

Set in a desolate, impoverished region of Anatolia, the bulk of the movie follows a series of winding country roads, as a prosecutor, a couple of policemen, a coroner, and some soldiers escort a self-confessed murder suspect and his cognitively different accomplice in search of the place where they buried the body. The murderer remembers a well, a tree, and some fields–but he was drunk and has only the vaguest sense of where they might have been. The description leads the party first to one spot, then another, but night is falling and so is morale…

If Samuel Beckett had written a crime thriller, it might have turned out something like this entrancing and profound work from a modern master.

A metaphysical road movie about life, death and the limits of knowledge, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia has arrived just in time to cure the adult filmgoer blues.

Manohla Dargis, New York Times

If the word masterpiece has any use these days, it must apply to the film Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, a mature, philosophically resonant work from Turkey’s leading director… A gorgeously shot crime story with emotionally layered characters and an indelible atmosphere of unease.

Liam Lacey, Globe & Mail

Mesmerizing… plays like Zodiac meets Police, Adjective.

Eric Kohn, Indiewire