How do you justify the unjustifiable? How do you get to the point where you feel morally in the right while you slaughter unarmed men, women and children? These are the questions director Emin Alper seeks to explore in “Salvation,” a film notionally about the longtail fallout from a land dispute, but more elementally about how violence happens. Set in a Turkish village high in the mountains, the director’s fifth film — and his first since the 2022’s Cannes Un Certain Regard entry “Burning Days” — follows the trajectory of Mesut (an excellent and tragically believable Caner Cı̇ndoruk), whose personal insecurities set him on a path leading to a massacre.
Mesut has always played second fiddle to his handsome younger brother, Sheikh Ferit (Feyyaz Duman). Their grandfather was an important man, seen by some as a savior of their village. He was their Sheikh, a local cultural and religious leader, and he passed this status on, not, as might have been expected, to the older brother, but to the younger. Meanwhile, Mesut’s wife is pregnant with twins and he is troubled by anxious dreams and thoughts concerning her sexual life. In the village, men mutter about their land being taken over by outsiders.
Psychologically, then, Mesut is on the back foot. Sexual jealousy, sibling rivalry and a broader feeling of impotence in the face of potential threats from outside combine in a potent brew that, lacking the ear of a good therapist, isn’t going to turn out well for anyone. That’s not to say that Alper falls into the fallacy of laying everything that subsequently happens at one man’s door: On the contrary, this is a smart study of a community.
Cı̇ndoruk gives a nimble performance as Mesut: At first, he plays a kind of low-status grudge-bearer, the sort of person who might be characterized as a boot-licker if there were any boots around that he deemed worthy of licking. Into this vacuum of leadership, as he perceives it, some chosen one must surely arrive. Lo and behold, he realizes it is he himself who must be reluctantly entrusted with the mission to protect his people. As he convinces others of his cause, he blossoms, and we see in his manner and bearing a man stretching himself out and becoming accustomed to power.
One of “Salvation’s” greatest strengths is in capturing a subjective sense of the threat that the villagers collectively feel themselves to be facing. The signs, portents and omens come thick and fast, almost to the point of caricature: a burned field, uncanny storms, a sleepwalking child, a pair of identical twin girls herding goats, and theoretical religious discussions of the possibility of having confused the roles of Cain and Abel. The mood is one of permanent unease, with all the characters bubbling away together in a melting pot of distrust.
Alper strategically avoids creating a clean delineation between dream worlds and reality. This deliberate decision to not formally telegraph dream sequences has an intentionally disorienting effect: We can’t tell when a character is experiencing a dream or vision until something explicitly unreal takes place. While we might not sympathize with Mesut as he foments specific acts of violence, this all-pervading atmosphere of psychological threat helps us see how he convinces himself of his mission. This apposite demonstration of religious convictions being used to prop up concrete actions, spurred on and given fuel by tribalist rivalries, elevates “Salvation” from a merely striking mood piece to an astute psychological study.
Sadly, the film isn’t mere fiction. In 2009, 44 people were murdered at a party in the Mardin Province of Turkey by masked assailants using automatic weapons and hand grenades. The attack left over 60 children orphaned. In taking this event as his starting point, Alper has created a film that is both culturally specific, and has plenty of wider applicability as well. There are, for instance, obvious parallels in “Salvation” with acts of violence committed by Israel in Gaza.
But the relevance of “Salvation” is even broader: The rhetoric of politicians like Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin, or of U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s statement that “we risk becoming an island of strangers,” plays on the same primal fears that allow Mesut to secure support for his bloodthirsty strongman tactics. As has been seen with ICE agents in the streets of Minneapolis, Mesut’s followers are very happy to indulge themselves in the sensation that they are noble soldiers defending themselves and their loved ones from foreigners, when they are in fact the aggressors.
The fact that “Salvation” is not overtly and literally about ICE, Palestine or any of the aforementioned political figures may provide useful cover for any festivals, curators or distributors frustrated by institutional complicity or timidity in confronting these issues directly in their programming. This is simply a film inspired by a tragedy in rural Turkey that occurred nearly 20 years ago. And if audiences or critics wish to reach for contemporary parallels drawn from other examples of reprehensible violence? Why, then they may do so.
