Dabbe: Cin Çarpmasi: The Devil You Don't Know

There are a number of things I feel like are overdone or just bad for scary movies in general. I think there’s sort of a glut of demonic possession movies, for example. And I’ve gone on the record at length, repeatedly, about how people need to stop making found-footage movies for awhile. And as a rule, I really, really dislike sequels and loathe the idea of “franchises.”

And so, by all rights, I should absolutely hate Dabbe: Cin Çarpmasi (Dabbe: The Possession). It’s a found-footage movie about demonic possession and it’s the fourth in a series of six movies. But damned if it isn’t pretty good. Between this and the films of Can Evrenol, I’m starting to wonder if I’ve been sleeping on Turkish horror all this time. It’s definitely got some flaws, but I think it manages to overcome the majority of them through sheer energy. It’s an intense film that puts a novel (to Western eyes) spin on some well-worn ideas.

That said, the beginning isn’t especially auspicious. We’re treated to a bunch of newspaper headlines about something terrible that happened in the village of Kibledere back in 1986. There’s a voiceover of a phone conversation between two people - one who’s trying to get at the truth of what happened, and another, a doctor who was there and really doesn’t want to share what he knows. It winds up with the doctor telling this other person to speak to a colleague of his who visited the village recently - Dr. Ebru Keraduman. Then there’s a barrage of horrific images that slam right into the title. It’s…not subtle. At all.

But we cut to Ebru as she’s testing out her camera. She’s a psychiatrist who’s taken an interest in claims of possession and the techniques employed by the people who claim to be able to exorcise evil spirits. So she’s come to watch one such exorcism and interview the person doing it, Faruk Akat. In a small room, a group of women and Faruk gather around another older woman, who alternates between wailing, frenetic cursing and threats to reveal everyone’s dirty secrets, and puking up gross-looking things into a kiddie pool in the middle of the circle. This goes on for some time, Faruk places strips of paper with writing on them into the pool, there’s a great roar and the possessed woman horks up something that looks like a teratoma. Faruk pronounces her cured.

Ebru is, needless to say, skeptical. She interviews Faruk, asking him what the specific mechanisms are behind exorcism, asking how this is anything distinct from more modern diagnoses of mental illness, challenging his narrative in the way you’d expect from a science-versus-mysticism sort of story, though maybe not as obnoxiously as she could. Still, he thinks he can prove what he does is real, and she puts the onus on him by stipulating that she choose his next client - someone he doesn’t know, so that collusion is more difficult. So they travel to visit relatives of Ebru’s - her aunt Refika and Refika’s daughter Kübra. They live in a small village not far from the abandoned ruins of Kibledere. Kübra hasn’t been feeling well lately.

At her engagement celebration, Kübra stabbed her fiancé to death. A voice told her to do it.

In some ways, this film embraces a number of cliches - the opening title sequence is something we’ve seen variations on a dozen times before, and you’ve got the skeptical scientist insisting on rational explanations for everything and the exorcist who insists that there’s more to heaven and earth than her philosophy. The possessed talk in creepy, raspy, unnaturally low voices and know stuff they shouldn’t be able to know. There are narrative turns that you’ll see coming if only because you know how these kinds of stories are structured. But it also avoids a number of cliches simply by being made outside of the West. The forces possessing these people are djinns, not demons, and it’s more than a cosmetic difference. Humanity’s relationship to them as a class of spirits is more complex than the Christian idea of demons, so it isn’t strictly a story of evil infiltrating a family. And Faruk is Muslim, so there’s a distinct absence of holy water, crosses and the Roman Ritual. This is, of course, not exotic at all in Turkey, but it’s new to me, and it gives me a different perspective on old ideas.

And even though the bones of the story are themselves nothing especially novel, they’re handled well and there’s a nice third-act twist that benefits from misdirection leading up to it. The imagery used to tell the story departs from cliché in a number of ways - there are some of the things you’d expect, but a lot of things you don’t see very often, some unnerving, some downright gross, but enough to keep you on your toes. It’s a story about spirits and curses and witchcraft and family secrets, giving it more to work with than the standard possession movie. Some moments may not land exactly right and might seem a little silly, but just as many contribute to a sense of dread, of the protagonists getting in over their head.

The story is told as a found-footage narrative, primarily from Ebru’s point of view, though the camera gets passed around a little, and there are some multi-camera setups for things she’s documenting. And like any other found-footage film, there’s a push and pull between plausibility (cameras being set up for interviews to capture different angles, the camera not always being pointed where it should because someone’s running for their life) and violation of that plausibility. There’s the occasional shot from an angle that can’t be accounted for, incidental music in places even though this is camcorder footage, unlikely close-ups, stuff like that, but for once it doesn’t really bother me because the story’s good enough and it has enough momentum and energy to keep me watching and not be so distracted by failures of verisimilitude.

And that momentum and energy is another thing I think it has going for it. It was obviously made on a low budget, but it isn’t necessarily cheap-looking, and the effects are mostly very simple. Sometimes they’re simple to the point of being a little clumsy or obvious, but it’s in a way that gives the film the same nervy, kinetic energy that The Evil Dead had. There’s an intensity and vigor to moments that sort of propel you past any shortcomings and keep the tension level high. It’s also got the same propensity for letting things happen while nobody’s in the room and use of camera distortion to indicate an evil presence that Final Prayer had, and the camerawork is believably jittery and close, which puts me in mind of [REC]. To my mind, this is some good company in which to be. It does dread and anxiety and creepy settings and normal settings with creepy things happening in them very well. And it’s…a histrionic film, there’s a lot of yelling, but it doesn’t come off as grating or contrived, and the relationships between people feel pretty believable. Even Ebru and Faruk, though they have very different takes on what’s happening around them, are mostly collegial, reasonable adults. And the whole thing rises to a shrill scream at the climax, ending on as dark and bleak a note as you could ask for. It’s a ride.

It does have its problems - the English subtitles are somewhat clumsily translated, which is part of what makes the title sequence less effective than it could be, and it ends up making one fairly important moment unintentionally comic. I was dismayed by the distasteful use of actual photos of children with birth defects to depict victims of a curse, and the ending, for all of its “oh shit oh shit” energy, does take a little long to get where it’s going. And that absolute gut-punch of an ending is somewhat undercut by a fairly unnecessary epilogue that pulls back a little on what we see. But all things considered, it’s a surprisingly strong effort for something that, to my mind, had so much going against it from the start.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix