Film
Mehmet Akif Büyükatalay’s promising film Hysteria raises many salient questions about responsibility in making films but goes awry when it turns into a thriller. By Christos Tsiolkas.
Mehmet Akif Büyükatalay’s Hysteria
In Mehmet Akif Büyükatalay’s Hysteria, the opening night film for the German International Film Festival, Devrim Lingnau plays Elif, an assistant on a film being directed by Yigit (Serkan Kaya). The film he is making is based on a horrific terrorist attack that occurred in Germany in the early 1990s, when a group of skinhead fascists set fire to a house in Solingen that was occupied by a Turkish family, killing five household members.
Like Yigit, Elif is a second-generation Turkish German. The young woman is clearly thrilled to be working with filmmakers she admires. She idolises Yigit’s wife, Lilith (Nicolette Krebitz), a director herself who is the producer, and is excited to work on a movie whose subject matter is galvanising and politically significant.
Elif is given charge of extras from an asylum seeker centre, who we first see in the rushes that Yigit has filmed. In the suitably ashen black-and-white footage, we see the men wander through burnt-out rooms, trying to make sense of the tragedy that has occurred there. One of the extras, Said (Mehdi Meskar), gives vent to his fury, and along with the filmmakers watching the rushes, we too experience the raw dynamism of his performance. When the driver, Majid (Nazmi Kırık), who is also one of the extras, fails to turn up at the end of the day, Lilith charges Elif with returning the men to the asylum centre. She also entrusts her with the keys to her and Yigit’s apartment and with safely storing the film canisters from the day’s shooting. At the asylum centre, Elif listens as the men take turns criticising or defending Yigit’s pretensions. More ominously, there is also anger expressed that a Quran has been burnt in the filming of that day’s scene. This outrage prompted Majid to walk off the set. When Elif goes to Yigit and Lilith’s apartment, she finds that the keys she has been given have disappeared. The next day, even more troublingly, it is discovered that the film canisters have also disappeared.
Hysteria is playing with a delicious set-up. It asks questions of intent and responsibility when it comes to filmmaking, including asking who has the right to tell the contemporary political stories that so dominate current cinema. An added frisson and complexity is that – apart from Lilith – all the characters are migrants or children of migrants themselves. Inevitably, class becomes as central an inquiry as issues of ethnicity and race.
Büyükatalay also wrote the script, and one of the film’s strengths is that it doesn’t rely on reductive tropes in establishing the characters. Setting it in the world of filmmaking, Büyükatalay is attentive to how much ego and opportunism is at play for all of his characters, whether they are the asylum seekers or the filmmakers themselves.
The most political of the extras, Mustafa (Aziz Çapkurt), is scathing about Yigit’s purpose in making his film. However, we are also aware that Mustafa is a director himself and we are never sure how much of his derision is righteous and how much stems from envy. Though the burning of the Quran is defended by Yigit as a right afforded to him by freedom of expression, it is also never clear whether it was initially an accident and if he is using the political fallout for his own aggrandisement and for extra publicity for his film. This constant shifting of perspective, this complex tension between the political ideals we purport to hold and the equally motivating desire for success and celebrity, initially suggests that Hysteria might be a great satire.
Unfortunately, satire isn’t enough for Büyükatalay. He also wants Hysteria to be a mystery thriller. In the attempted integration of horror with politics, there are stylistic nods to Roman Polanski and Michael Haneke’s intellectually rigorous cinema. However, Büyükatalay doesn’t yet have the formal confidence of either of those directors. The suspense sequences, built around the question of who stole the film canisters, are ham-fisted and lack any tension. The script is at its weakest when it is trying to build on this mystery, most egregiously in Elif’s increasingly strained attempts to deflect attention from her losing the keys to the apartment. Her actions become increasingly unbelievable and begin to undercut both our sympathies for her character and our trust in the story.
Whereas in Haneke’s films the omniscience of digital surveillance forms a further visual level for interrogation of the characters and their relationship to politics and history, in Hysteria they feel extraneous. There is no illumination arising from these scenes and we never experience the visceral fears the migrant characters feel at the intrusion of this technology in their lives.
Büyükatalay must have a sense that he has lost control of his narrative because when the denouement arrives – a clumsily staged argument with all the main characters in Yigit and Lilith’s apartment – the dialogue lacks veracity and purpose. The exchanges are wearisome, as if Büyükatalay wants to hit certain marks about freedom of artistic expression versus the responsibility of the artist to the communities they are representing, yet none of the insults or counterarguments feel organic to the characters.
All the wit of satire has been sacrificed and we are left with a room of confused actors yelling at each other. The final scene, an act of incendiary violence, is so badly executed that I had to look away from the screen. I had stopped caring for any of the characters and for this story.
The most saddening aspect of Büyükatalay’s misguided desire to propel his narrative into the thriller genre is that in earlier scenes he has shown himself to be a careful and talented director of actors. His relative inexperience as a filmmaker is clear from the outset, because we don’t ever believe we are on an actual film set. We get no sense of the exigencies and compromises that are inherent to the filmmaking process.
Yet when he concentrates on the more intimate scenes, such as the initial conversation between Elif and Said, he does indicate a flair for realism. Lingnau and Meskar are terrific in these early scenes, allowing us glimpses into both the differences and the shared empathies of first- and second-generation migrant lives. Büyükatalay also allows space for us to understand the very different experiences of Yigit, Mustafa and Majid.
Çapkurt is expert in essaying a man who is filled with rage but also vainglorious and self-delusional. And I think Kırık is wonderful as Majid. We comprehend that, for him, the burning of the Quran is not simply a matter of politics. He feels the insult as a blow and makes even the most secular audience feel the outrage of the blasphemy. Given all this, it is even more frustrating that this gentle initial work in building up the characters is forfeited for thriller melodramatics.
Inexperience is forgivable. As I hope I have indicated, Büyükatalay demonstrates strong gifts in his work with actors, which will keep me curious about the films he makes in the future. However, whatever our own individual responses to the burning of a sacred text and the complex politics of blasphemy in film and art, undeniably the real outrage at the heart of Hysteria is the heinous attack on the Turkish family that occurred in Solingen. They were real people and they were real murders.
Just as with Yigit, Büyükatalay has every right to make his film about this terrorist crime. Where he is woefully mistaken is to conclude with a scene of an inferno that is not only shoddily directed but obviously an attempt to overlay his narrative with a gravitas and power that his screenplay has failed to achieve. It’s a misguided and self-serving ending and it undermines everything that has gone before it.
The German Film Festival runs in various venues nationally until May 28.
ARTS DIARY
BALLET Manon
Sydney Opera House, Gadigal Country/Sydney, until May 17
FESTIVAL South Side Festival 2025
Venues throughout Bunurong Country/Frankston, May 8-18
LITERATURE Melbourne Writers Festival
Venues throughout Naarm/Melbourne, May 8-11
EXHIBITION Touching the Divine: Love and Devotion in Asian Art
Art Gallery of South Australia, Kaurna Yarta/Adelaide, until July 1
COMEDY Perth Comedy Festival
Venues throughout Whadjuk Noongar Country/Perth, until May 18
LAST CHANCE
CULTURE Truth to Power Cafe – Election Night Special
Tuggeranong Arts Centre, Ngambri/Canberra, May 3
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on May 3, 2025 as "Genre trouble".
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