Writer-director Emin Alper’s Salvation stages a multifaceted tale of inter-ethnic conflict that refracts several contemporary political issues, while also deriving a kind of ancient religious significance from its confined agrarian setting. When these overlapping allegorical notes harmonize, the film resonates with urgency and genuine horror, but they can also stifle the human aspects of the tragedy depicted.
Salvation begins as the Bezari clan are due to reclaim their land around their remote Turkish mountain village, which they were forced to leave for some time due to a terrorist threat. The Hazerans of the neighboring village stuck around to fight off the insurgency, while also grazing their livestock and planting on their opposing clan’s patch. This more fertile land was what had previously led to the Bezaris’ comparative power and prosperity, and the Hazerans are now understandably unwilling to relinquish it and retreat to their former subordinate position.
While the film is, on the surface, preoccupied with the material concerns of its warring tribes, the location where its action unfolds never quite feels like a living, breathing place, lacking depth or the kind of detail that brings authentic texture to a setting. Instead, the village’s maze-like layout and sudden vertical drops read more as metaphor, effectively mirroring the mental state of Salvation’s troubled protagonist, Mesut (Caner Cindoruk).
The collective inferiority and humiliation of his clan is felt particularly strongly by Mesut, in part because of how these ideas mesh with his own personal resentments. Having expected to inherit the position of sheikh, the village leader, which was once held by his legendary grandfather, he was passed over in favor of his younger brother, the more charismatic Sheikh Ferit (Feyyaz Duman). This was in part due to Mesut’s marriage to Gülsüm (Özlem Taş), whose former role as a servant to the Bezari leader is a particular source of shame for him and other village elders.
With most of this exposition dumped in a number of impassioned sermons and coffee table conversations throughout its early going, Salvation seems to retreat inwardly as it progresses, Mesut’s superstitions and sexual hang-ups increasingly coming to the fore. The eerie, recurring presence of identical twin girls, who might be figments of his imagination, foreshadows a doctor’s revelation that Gülsüm herself is expecting twins, interpreted as a possible sign of satanic meddling. Mesut is also haunted by a vivid dream of her being seduced and violated by an invisible presence, echoing a scandalous, possibly untrue story from a scheming local about the favors that Gülsüm was once forced to carry out for her wealthy Bezari employer.
Much of Salvation’s dream imagery is presented in exactly the same stark, realist register as the rest of the film, presumably to illustrate the sleep-deprived Mesut’s inability to discern fact from fantasy. But this choice also tends to detract from the potency of these visions, as they rarely feel transportive or troubling enough to bring out the kind of mania that he’s consumed by.
As the pressure mounts on the Hazerans to cede their territory and minor disturbances start to accumulate, Mesut’s anger and growing sense of persecution give him ever greater power and influence in the village, eventually allowing him to usurp Ferit’s role. As well as sealing the fate of the villagers, this latter development indicates a point of no return for the film itself.
Even without prior knowledge of the 2009 massacre in a Kurdish village on which Alper loosely based Salvation, it’s clear that Mesut’s delusional beliefs can only lead one way, his newfound leadership role entailing a grisly final reckoning with the Bezaris that’s all but guaranteed. While the mood remains convincingly ominous, the story is left in a kind of stasis for much of its second half, with the weight of symbolism dragging it down and stalling the characterizations.
Never quite engaging on the level of narrative, Salvation also leaves its political significance ultimately obscure, failing to fully tease out the multiple interesting parallels it offers to real-world personality cults, territorial disputes, and extremism. Alper’s most explicit message seems to be that sectarian violence can be boiled down to little more than individual pathology, which can’t help but feel reductive, particularly as the film fails to elucidate the full extent of Mesut’s motivations and emotional states, beyond his anger, paranoia and all-consuming insecurity.
However, when the simmering tension is broken with an abrupt burst of violence, it’s all the more upsetting for its inevitability, as well as the subsequent lack of resolution. While it’s perhaps not ideal that this incident is just as much a relief from the film’s inertia as the believable consequence of Mesut’s psychological deterioration, the visceral, evocative darkness of Salvation’s finale almost justifies the drawn-out slog that precedes it.
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