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Once Upon a Time in Anatolia Movie Review

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is a 2011 Turkish drama film directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan. It’s one of the director’s lesser works.

A group of men set out in search of a dead body in the Anatolian steppes. This is just a basic premise behind the movie that would suggest it’s going to be a crime story, but it ended up being nothing of the sort for better and for worse. This is a pure dialogue-driven drama that only has some crime elements, but is mostly squarely focused on touching upon a variety of themes.

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Yes, the dialogue is dense needless to say. It is so dense, in fact, that even I as a fan of this type of movie found it to be too much. It’s a procedural on its surface, which is not my favorite genre of storytelling, so that was a hurdle for me. Most of the themes lie within this area of expertise, but thankfully a more psychologically insightful examination of such themes as suicide, obsession, police work and so on was present.

But again, the movie deals with so many of these themes over such a long period of time that the end result is somewhat diluted. The Russian literature elements were the best with others failing to garner much traction. Ceylan usually is excellent at making extremely long movies and he is great at character studies, but this time around his characters were of a lesser quality.

The doctor and the prosecutor do make an impact and their conversations and dynamic are easily the most memorable of the bunch. The acting is also universally terrific from everybody involved, especially from Uzuner and Erdogan. I just wish others received better treatment.

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia has a very loose storytelling structure, which personally bothered me as I prefer the opposite in my films. The cinematography is strong and the editing is also pretty good for such a long movie, but again the slow pace of the movie coupled with its extensive runtime and somewhat repetitive structure made it not that engaging of a watch. Ceylan has made better movies, so this one being his most important work is baffling to me as I find it to be quite overrated.

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I usually love the films of Nuri Bilge Ceylan, but Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is in my opinion one of his lesser works. This movie deals with so many themes – suicide, police work, obsession and some Russian literature elements are sprinkled throughout as well. But the film ended up being too dense, structurally loose and as usual overlong. Some conversations are excellent and quite deep, but watching the movie as a whole, it failed to attach all of its diverse elements into a cohesive whole.

My Rating – 3.5