A director and his assistant stare through a monitor at the pitch dark charred facade of a house, erected inside a sound stage. The house is a replica of the one in Solingen, Germany where a notorious act of arson in 1993 committed by a group of young far-right extremists left five Turkish migrant women and girls of the Genç family dead.
One of the more eerie early images in Mehmet Akif Büyükatalay’s (“Oray”) provocative and suspenseful sophomore feature “Hysteria,” is only superficially a reveal of the overrated genre that is the film within the film. Part of what makes the image eerie — other than the haunting opacity of its black and charcoal palette, reminiscent of a falsely abandoned Moria — is the gut unease it evokes about the motivations behind the cinematic re-enactment. For starters, who is telling whose story, and why? The meta implications “Hysteria” will need to address — and which its characters are given no dearth of occasions to pontificate on — are thus established.
What follows is an absorbing story — by way of a lengthy, character-focused mystery thriller — reflecting Germany’s continued struggles with its large numbers of Muslim, particularly Turkish, immigrants and refugees. Of course, “Germany’s continued struggles” is the received framing Büyükatalay wants to subvert.
The re-enactment, however, is not the film’s inciting incident. After the shoot, a Quran was found burnt inside the remains of the house — an accident, purportedly — by the group of mostly Turkish men brought in as extras from the refugee center as “witnesses” of the aftermath. One of them, Majid (Nazmi Kirik), fervently explains to the shrewd, resourceful half Turkish (it turns out) but entirely white-passing intern Elif (Devrim Lingnau) that only certain kinds of Quran disposal — for instance, burning by the banks of the holy River Tigris — are acceptable. “Respect” needs to be clearly denoted, whereas Majid insists there is no respect at all in the burning of a Quran for the sake of a film, no less to satisfy the creative instincts or alleviate the trauma claimed by Yiğit (Serkan Kaya), the film’s conflicted German director of Turkish descent who was a kid when the Solingen incident occurred.
As another refugee character, Mustafa (Aziz Çapkurt), a former theater director, later tells an unmoved Elif, films such as these (winking to “Hysteria” itself) kowtow to the “imperative for a clean conscience of Europe.” Hereon, “Hysteria” levels up from fraught political drama to a mystery thriller procedural. Elif inadvertently loses the footage of the recreation shoot, and in her own nervousness about being blamed for theft or lose face in front of the aloof producer Lilith (Nicolette Krebitz) who might offer her a promotion, sets off a chain of events which skillfully build to a tense climax combining the film’s two modes.
Büyükatalay’s script deserves kudos for the high, perhaps extreme, degree of pain it goes into to imbue each character with an ambiguity, a motivation for the crime, an implicit bias of course, and a hardened if inchoate view of what reparations, religious tolerance, and respect ought to consist of. The ensemble isn’t quite the catchall for the sociopolitical backdrop of contemporary Western Europe, post the migrant and refugee crises of the 2010s. But the ways Büyükatalay is nimble and precise with turns of plot, and how he characterizes Elif as a quasi main character — importantly, he suggests why her inconspicuous biraciality is tied to her personal trust issues — keep us invested in the proceedings even as we find ourselves complicit in casually forming alliances with individual characters who mirror our own political leanings. “Hysteria” excels in shepherding such nuance even if it fails to mine sufficient atmosphere to reach a truly singeing denouement. Using woke terminology from a time when “woke” wasn’t yet canceled but occupied a genuine place in the global resistance to fascism, each character’s brownness and religiosity are shown to lie on a spectrum of legibility and convenience, and intersect with their lived experience of being oppressed on the registers of nation, class, color, and gender.
For instance, Majid’s views as an older, working class, newly arrived Turkish refugee take the form of black-or-white modus ponens argument: if you burn the Quran, you’re a Nazi; Yiğit burnt the Quran, thus Yiğit is a Nazi. By contrast, Yiğit dabbles in sweeping generalizations: “As a minority, they demand freedom. But they don’t grant any when in power,” failing to account for the fact that, as Mustafa might put it, he too is the child of Turkish immigrants and enjoys the white privilege as a member of the German creative class. Lilith, as an ethnically ambiguous German woman who doesn’t pass as easily as Elif keeps her biases high up her sleeve, until the gloves come off in the final confrontation; the calm rationality she has wielded as an astute producer flips to become a shield for her sense of superiority.
Thus layer upon charged layer of “Hysteria” builds a mass. Construed as a pedagogical exercise more than entertainment, the film offers a deep reading into the complicated plurality of the populace that constitutes nations such as Germany. The insight that the trauma experienced by a prior wave of Muslim immigrants cannot be fully assessed by waves decades later is sobering. New regimes have risen in the interim, absorbing old ones. A film within a film cannot come close to approximating mega forces such as neoliberalism, which usurp and spit out Islamophobia and racism as systemic effluent.
Intellectual insight completes not a movie though. “Hysteria” collapses to an extent under the mass of its own literalism and barbs, even as it tries to marry mystery and suspense with political poignance. The mise-en-scene towards the end feels clumsy, even a bit limp, and the plotting becomes forced.
Curiously, the Quran itself gets shoved aside, a burnt artifact whose light is shut and whose fire is doused. If that ultimate Othering, however, is the eerie unseen image that Büyükatalay aimed for, then perhaps his film too can join the wide swathe of history that has adjudicated book burnings.
Grade: B
“Hysteria” premiered at the 2025 Berlin Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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