Kosmos

The New Review (UK) 17 June 2012, p. 25

Film

The work of a respected Turkish film-maker little known in Britain, Reha Erdem’s confident, skilfully framed allegory centres on a bearded, cheerfully grinning young man descending on an unnamed town, shattered by warfare on the closed border between two unidentified countries. The time is winter, the ground covered in snow, the wind endlessly blowing, the political context obviously Turkey and Armenia. The visitor revives a drowned child and goes on to perform other miracles, each heralded then rejected. Is he a messiah, a faith healer, a visitor from another planet, an inspired fraud or a holy fool? All of these possibilities seem to be left open as the film comes full circle in a way that resembles Roman Polanski’s playfully pessimistic first movie, Two Men and a Wardrobe.

Kosmos (122 mins, 12A) Directed by Reha Erdem; starring Sermet Yesil, Türkü Turan, Serka Keskin