The Funeral

It seems Orçun Berham has taken a page straight out of the "uninspired imitation" playbook for his latest horror film, "Cenaze." The film shamelessly borrows the best scenes, even going so far as to replicate the character's makeup and costumes directly, from the cult classic "Lat den rätte komma in" and its equally acclaimed American remake. To add insult to injury, the lead role is given to Ahmet Rifat Sungar, an actor who has been playing the same character in the same way for his last 35 films, and not even doing it well in recent outings. Everyone else in the film delivers commendable performances, but Sungar's acting is painfully subpar.

The dialogue feels as if it were churned out by an AI, and the film attempts to shoehorn in the dynamic from "Bones and All," a film that was already quite poor on its own merits.

It's baffling that Berham, the director behind such creative works as "The Antenna" (2019), would resort to such blatant plagiarism. And why would someone attempting to make a zombie film create a two-hour-long slog? It's as if he thought millions of viewers who enjoyed the aforementioned films wouldn't notice the similarities. Yet, two-thirds of the comments on the film point out these very issues. One would expect a modicum of shame, but then again, this reliance on imitation rather than originality seems to be the hallmark of what we call Turkish cinema, a trend that has persisted from the past to the present day, and sadly, shows no signs of abating.

It's truly perplexing. Why would a director capable of such creative work stoop to this level of unoriginality? And why on earth would a zombie film need to be two hours long?