The two leading characters in this strange film from Turkish director Reha Erdem communicate via bird calls and animal noises. One of them is Kosmos (Sermet Yesil), a thief who arrives at a small, dilapidated town in midwinter and saves a single mother’s child from drowning in the river. She calls herself Neptün and the connection remains.
Welcomed by the townspeople and given hospitality at the local café, the gnomic stranger, inbetween thieving, seems to perform miracles, from curing an old man of chronic asthma to satisfying a lonely widow sexually. People don’t like what they don’t know and can’t explain, though, and so, like Christ, he is driven out.
Kosmos is so stunningly shot by Florent Herry, the Belgian cinematographer, that just looking at it is a constant pleasure, but whether you think it a bucketful of pretentious codswallop or a genuinely philosophical treatise on the state of both Turkey and the world is really a matter of patience and temperament.
MORE ABOUT