HAYAL-I CİHAN/ THE DREAM OF CİHAN follows a predictable path. A clean-cut young man Cihan (Okan Yalabık) rents a house just outside İstanbul and discovers to his cost that it is haunted by a specter (Çetin Tekindor). After a couple of nights' agony wondering how and where it came from, he manages to catch the specter and discovers the terrible story about how it came to be there in the first place.
A made-for-television chiller from the pen of Çagan Irmak, HAYAL-I- CİHAN bears all the hallmarks of a quickly-shot piece: the narrative unfolds in a series of shot/reverse shots, point of view shots and tracking shots, as the camera moves freely round the single location to denote Cihan's disturbed state of mind, as well as trying to create a spooky atmosphere. The music by Bora Ebeoğlu, Cenk Erdoğan and Cengiz Onural comes at opportune moments to establish a further sense of menace. The dénouement turns out not to be as spooky as we might have anticipated.
What gives this thriller its interest is that it sums up Irmak's approach to filmmaking. He is very much a worldly filmmaker, not given to speculating on humanity's relationship either to the universe or the deity. Rather he is preoccupied with aspects of "normality" and how they are often under attack in modern-day societies. This might be something disorientating for the characters, but at the same time potentially liberating, offering new spaces of thought and feeling that might lead to a reshaping of one's perception of the world. Perhaps we need to have extremes of feeling in order to make sense of ourselves, rather than conforming always to what others expect of us.
Irmak's cinematic style is very much "mainstream" in the sense that the narrative unfolds briskly with very little time allotted for viewers to contemplate the mise-en-scene. He knows how to tell a good story, which is one of the main reasons for his continued popularity.
