Housewife (2017)

directed by Can Evrenol
Turkey
82 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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I've been thinking lately about horror movies that have freaked me out so bad I start to think "I don't want to see this anymore, please make it stop", and I can only come up with a few of them, but Can Evrenol's previous film Baskın is one. This made Housewife one of my most anticipated films of the past year or so, and although I had high expectations, I wasn't disappointed. 

It takes a very long time for this film to become fully what it is; it makes itself look like a psychological drama about a young woman lured into a cult because of her violent childhood until all of a sudden in the last half-hour it's... not. It's very clever at this because it genuinely does take a smart look at what makes people join cults: it introduces the main character to the cult while she's in a precarious mental state, and she immediately latches onto the cult leader because of something he says that, to her, indicates that he understands her personally, that he's the one she's been looking for and vice versa. This is of course not entirely true but it's one aspect of how people get lured into cults: parts of themselves that are vulnerable are preyed upon. So this is a story of a girl tricking herself and being tricked into thinking a cult leader can tap into something unearthly that turns into "Oh, this cult leader actually is tapped into something unearthly".

Can Evrenol seems to be really good at creating these kind of pocket-realities where horrible things can and do happen, yet the normal reality we're used to is still playing out in the background. It's like the world is ending only for the people trapped up in these nightmare scenarios. It's more difficult to explain the way this is executed in words than I thought it would be, but it's kind of like the narrative equivalent of leaving several apps running in the background at the same time and switching between them- they can all exist at the same time, all functioning simultaneously.

I was going to only give this three and a half stars because I felt like it honestly didn't match the gravity of Baskın, but those last few minutes really, really got me. Housewife starts out with one woman's trauma and eventually builds into a deep and all-reaching finality, not just for her but for everyone. I still feel like it stays subdued for a little too long, but once the reality of the plotline fully breaks through in the third act, it's cosmic.