By Nia Edwards-Behi
In 2014 I saw the short film Baskin while at Celluloid Screams in Sheffield. My thoughts on that film were that I liked what I saw, but that it felt far too much like a scene from something bigger. Delight, then, when I heard that director Can Evrenol was indeed working on a feature version of his short. In vaguest summary, both films concern a squadron of police officers who find themselves stumbling upon hell itself in an abandoned mansion. Tried as I might to see Evrenol’s debut feature on a big screen, opportunity did not knock, and having now watched the film at home I really regret that. It’s a visual delight, that’s for sure, and I’m not sure my small screen did it justice. It’s immensely satisfying to know that a film like Baskin is getting a limited cinema run in the UK, though, so maybe my chance is still to come.
The film establishes its troupe of police officers very well, their amiable machismo just on the right side of making me hate them. I mean, I still doubt very much I’d want to be friends with any of these poor souls, but they are not quite so misogynistically detestable that I’m willing their painful deaths from scene one. No, instead, they’re just a blokey blokes in a blokey job, and that shows immensely in the way they interact with each other. If two of the men stand out, it’s rookie Arda (Gorkem Kasal) and his uncle and boss, Remzi (Ergun Kuyucu). We find Arda as our centrepoint in the otherwise relatively straightforward story when he recalls at length an experience he had as a child (depicted, in part, as the film’s opening scene), only to discover his uncle has had similar eerie experiences. When they find themselves in the midst of the hellish mansion, this background proves vital to the way events play out.
And boy, do they play out. For the bulk of its duration, Baskin is a sort of metaphysical drama, but once things kick off, they really kick off. There’s almost a bit too much going on in this strange hellscape, making it a bit hard to quite distinguish just what gross thing is going on. The film, in this regard, also wasn’t quite what I expected. I think what I was assuming I was getting was an ordeal film, with most of the action taking place in the house, and while that is part of it, it’s not done in so conventional a way as what I expected. Now, that’s a good thing! After the initial blitzkrieg of bloodied deviancy, our protagonists are captured and everything calms down which makes the violence that follows more effectively distressing than the bombardment that comes directly beforehand.
Comparisons have already been made between Evrenol’s Baskin(s) and the gore films of Lucio Fulci. It’s certainly evident in the dramatic gore itself, but Fulci’s influence might also be seen in the mythological elements of the film, most obviously in the gateway to Hell aspect of the narrative (there’s a great scene with a spider, too, which amusingly makes an otherwise stoic policeman scream). That’s not the only classic horror influence on Baskin, which successfully manages to use bright red and blue lighting à la Suspiria in a way that doesn’t feel messy or hamfisted. The only homage that didn’t work for me was the use of a very familiar musical cue during a scene of eye gouging. Though not inappropriate, its use was just jarring and immediately took me out of the intense scene that was unfolding.
I’m not sure if the very ending of the film is a nice use of a trope or simply a bit predictable. Given everything that’s come before it, though, it’s difficult to think of any other sensible way to end the film. The start of the film establishes such an excellent sense of relative mundanity that the chaos that follows is even more intense, and there’s no easy way to wrap that up. Evrenol has assembled a great cast and put on screen a wonderful vision of horror. Although the ‘horrible happenings in a house’ setup has been done plenty, Evrenol brings enough of his own imagination to proceedings to make it entirely entertaining and watchable. If you do get a chance to see the film on a big screen, take it, as it’s one that ought be seen big and seen loud.
Baskin comes to UK cinemas and VOD on Friday 15th July 2016, from Vertigo Films.