HoopTober 8: Mosquito Takes Mandragon

Movie 70
10th of 12 countries: Turkey

I didn't really know what to expect from Baskin. I knew it had a reputation for some pretty extreme horror, and it certainly delivers on that. Believe me, if the likes of Saw are too stomach churning for you, don't come within a mile of this movie.

What surprised me was its oblique, metaphysical plotting. This is a pretty slow burn as far as the escalation goes. Something is clearly awry, but it's hard to know why: we get footage of someone walking through dark streets carrying a bucket with something... fleshy... just poking over the rim. This gets delivered to a diner where five cops are drinking coffee and having a conversation, and is then thrown on the grill in the kitchen. To what end, I still don't know - they don't even eat the meat, but there's a suggestion that something obscurely occult might be going on.

Exposition is largely eschewed, but we start to piece together some of the personal history of these cops. The key characters seem to be the young rookie of the team, Arda (Görkem Kasal) who confides to the team boss, Remzi (Ergun Kuyucu) - who also seems to be some kind of father figure for him from outside and before the police force - that he has been having strange prophetic dreams. There's an ugly altercation when one of the team, Yavuz (Muharrem Bayrak) makes an unprovoked attack on the diner owner's son. At this point, the specific social dynamic of cops versus everyone else in a society where civil liberties might not be at levels assumed by a western audience is suddenly conveyed, in quite elegant fashion. Remzi, who has seemed a figure of quiet, reserved, even benevolent authority, actually encourages the violence from Yavuz, and that comes as a shock.

Even when the cops leave the diner, we have a long passage of the film where they drive around in the darkness and things get curiouser and curiouser. At some point, probably in the diner, these guys seem to have passed through a gate into another world - and it ain't wonderland. The change is subtle - a naked man flashes across the road in front of their van, and they question some tramps who seem unusually disrespectful and unafraid of the cops. In fact, they seem to find their presence amusing - like they know something the cops don't. There's even still a vestige of the "real" world, as they receive a call for back-up at an old derelict house.

So have they passed into hell at this point or not? The boundary is not well defined, but once they go into this house and descend the stairs, the nightmare begins. Is it literally hell? We don't get fire and brimstone and devils with pitchforks. But we do get wall to wall torture and horrifying minions which take the form of naked people crawling around with rags tied around their eyes, acting like animals. There will be an encounter with someone who may or may not be a demon, but at this point the distinction between demonic and human has ceased to be relevant. It doesn't matter what these things are - all you need to know is that you are fucked.

And yet, there remains a very strong sense of psychological horror to all of this. It isn't just a flat-out torture fest - I find those kinds of movies boring as well as unpleasant. This is certainly unpleasant, but it's also quite interesting. There are some hints that none of this may actually be happening in reality - but those hints are highly equivocal. Ultimately Baskin leaves its audience with a metaphysical puzzle - it's a gut wrenchingly nightmarish puzzle, but a puzzle nonetheless. Its enigmatic storytelling and the fact that it is really quite beautifully crafted as a piece of cinema make this, at worst, a very intriguing ordeal.

Clearly this is not a film for everyone - make no mistake, this is pretty extreme and very torrid material - but I think there's undeniable quality to it.