Dabbe 5: Zehr-I-Cin: The Devil’s In The Details

When I wrote up Dabbe: The Possession about seven months ago, I observed that by all rights, I should not like it. It was a found-footage film about demonic possession, and the second in a series of seven films. I’m really picky about found-footage films, stories about demonic possession can get very cliched very quickly, and I am not at all fond of sequels or (ugh) franchises And yet, I really liked it. It had a real energy and sharpness to it, and coming from a culture fairly different from my own, it felt fresh in a number of ways. It wasn’t perfect - the translation was pretty clumsy and there were some pacing issues, but overall I thought it was a solid effort, intense and spooky in equal measure.

So I was genuinely curious to see if lightning would strike twice, and I have to say, Dabbe 5: Zehr-I-Cin (Dabbe 5: Curse Of The Jinn), an eerie and tense account of the sins of someone’s past, makes a good case for itself.

The film opens in voiceover, with an account of something that happened in the village of Viransehir in 1979. It’s the last recorded testimony of a mullah who lived in the village, alluding to something terrible that he warned the villagers against trying. The villagers didn’t heed his warning, and terrible discoveries were made there. Black magic, human sacrifice. The mullah vanished, leaving behind only some notes and audiotapes. We cut to a cave, a woman giving birth surrounded by other women. As soon as she’s delivered the child and the cord is cut, the baby is whisked off someplace by a group of men carrying rifles. The woman screams in anguish, begging to have her baby brought back to her.

Meanwhile, in present-day Istanbul, Dilek and her husband Ömer are asleep in their home, when Dilek is startled awake by the sound of someone in their house. She tries to wake up her husband to see what’s going on, but he just rolls over and pulls the covers over himself even tighter. Not exactly the picture of chivalry. As she moves carefully through the house, she can’t find anything. The next morning, she’s fighting exhaustion while getting Ömer off to work. The noises in the middle of the night didn’t help, and when she tries to settle down for a nap she’s plagued by nightmares.

Strange noises, nightmares, and soon enough, doors slamming shut by themselves, glassware smashing onto the floor. There’s something very wrong going on in their house.

So this is the fifth in a series of seven movies, which let’s face it, if these were being made in the U.S., would mean we’d be faced with a stale retread of something that might have been good the first time around, but is now just a bunch of motions through which everyone is going, with a storyline as contrived and convoluted as Godzilla is tall and irritable. But in this case, based on the two that I’ve seen, what we have instead are distinct, unrelated stories that share a number of broad narrative beats. They’re more like variations on a theme than anything else. Which means, on the one hand, that we don’t have to navigate the tiresome rationalizations for why this particular monster/demon/serial killer is on the rampage yet again, which is nice. On the other, the similarities mean that some things that should be a surprise end up being less of a surprise, and afterward I realized just how many of the same notes both films hit. I suspect that if I watched a bunch of these films back-to-back that they’d get formulaic pretty quickly.

But in the moment, it works, and that’s largely because it’s also as much its own thing as it is a riff on the same themes as the previous film It’s not a found-footage film like Dabbe: The Possession was (and thank goodness for that), and it’s more visually inventive as a result. The color grading runs from warm tones to sickly, grainy, greenish pallor, many shots are slightly distorted with fisheye or tilt-shift effects and vignetted, giving even mundane moments a sense of unease or unreality. Points of view change regularly - there’s some SnorriCam work, shots framed like they’re from surveillance footage (even though they aren’t), shots that are surveillance camera footage that glitch and stutter to good effect. So things seem slightly unreal, but there’s also paranoia, a feeling of being watched. Sound design is very good as well, using slamming doors and sudden crashes to keep things feeling tense. The tools are all pretty simple, there’s not a whole lot in the way of special effects (which is good, because some of what there is ends up being sort of dodgy), just knowing what looks and sounds creepy, and it goes a long way. And when things really start to pop off, it can have the same kind of frenetic intensity that reminds me of The Evil Dead, which goes a long way toward giving what could otherwise be fairly simple conceits some real edge.

Like the previous film, it’s a story about curses and djinns, not demons or devils, so it’s something a little more complex than your usual “demon possesses young woman for reasons” story. Again, there’s a past at work here, the culmination of something that happened a long time ago, so on top of the horror there’s something of a mystery element to it that keeps it from descending into an assemblage of scares. It’s not an especially character-driven film, the performances seem fine, though again I think stuff gets lost in translation and though none of the characters are really obnoxious, nor are they especially developed. It doesn’t really hurt the film, and you don’t have any unintentionally comic translations this time around, fortunately, but I wonder if a little more subtlety would have helped. It does share pacing problems with the previous film - for most of its running time things move along at a nice clip, but the end drags on a little too long and threatens to lose focus.

And I think this is ultimately my biggest concern with the film - all of the ways it is broadly, structurally similar to the previous film. The characters are all different, details are different, how the story gets told is different, and this is all to the good. But in both films, you’ve got an opening alluding to something terrible that happened in a small village years ago, passing references to apocalyptic events, a young woman suffering under a curse, a betrayal, a return to where it all started, and a framing that suggests this was based on true events. None of those things are by themselves problems - some of it is a little hackneyed, maybe - but it meant I was able to anticipate some things that would have been better off as surprises. It’s still a formula, even if it’s not the one I usually find tiresome. But on their own, both films in this series that I’ve seen have been very well-executed, enough that I’m genuinely interested in seeking out the others. But I’ll probably give myself some time in between them, in the hopes that maybe I will be surprised the next time around.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix
Available on Amazon