Sayara: A Revenge Flick From Can Evrenol

One of the most prominent and exceptional figures of contemporary horror cinema, Can Evrenol is so back with his recent revenge saga in which we have a story as disturbing as the scenes of ultimate brutality. Celebrated for his intelligence and striking creativity, Evrenol is now traumatizing us with his plot and providing a feast with his breathtaking martial arts scenes where Sayara bewitches the audience with her own understanding of justice as a femme fatale who has the sexiest and the most intense darkness within herself.

Evrenol states that he lets himself be influenced by a variety of movies when he is making one, and shares that films such as Only God Forgives, Kinatay, I Saw the Devil, Snowtown, and High Tension played a big part of inspiration during the making of Sayara. As we all know, the touches of À l'intérieur, Ms.45, Hostel, Martyrs, The Raid, Frontiers, and I Spit on Your Grave are also visible in his anti-revenge tale Sayara: The Angel of Vengeance. So in simple terms, a feast is waiting for you if you haven't seen the movie yet. ps: spoiler alert.

Done with behind the scenes, let's dig deeper and take on o psychoanalytical and summary-like approach because we are going to deal with a wide variety of concepts such as Freud's Eros and Thanatos, moral agency, and the crash of ID vs. Ego.

A quiet, naive, and observing cleaning lady of the gym, Sayara lives with her older sister and mother in Istanbul. Her sister has an affair with the gym owner Barış, and Sayara, knowing the situation, is not okay with this affair but at the same time, she is psychosexually intimidated and tempted by him too, which is shown in a dream-like sequence with a passionate kiss of Sayara and Barış. However, Sayara, who has the utmost moral agency, tries to hold herself and her sister back. At a moment in time when Sayara's ID nearly overpowers her Ego, she pulls herself back using her moral agency to decide what is wrong and what is not. Gym is already a seductive place, and Barış intendedly or unintendedly tempts her. Even though she seems highly introverted, the gestures fuel her inner turmoil. But knowing the harm awaiting for them, Sayara steps back; yet can't rescue her sister.

Fears come true, the story begins, Barış and his friends kill Sayara's sister, leaving Sayara to release the evil she has long embraced.

If you ask me what traumatized you the most, I would try to tell you about that particular scene and the gruesome design of the character portrayal of Evrenol's camera. As a group of spoiled kids, the movie features four characters: one is weaker and cowardly, another is ruthless and sickeningly evil, third is terrifyingly unhinged, and the last one, Barış, is the one who retreats into his childhood and justifies the horrors that they have committed by avoiding self-blame and rejecting his moral agency. Yet, like the other three, Barış is also an equally animalistic, abusive murderer.

The silence of the 'weaker' characters during the rape scene is hauntingly portrayed to the point of literally creating an uneasy feeling of discomfort that stems from being unable to change the situation and make them do something to stop the others where Yonca is brutally murdered. This feeling of discomfort and psychological violence are as brutal as physical violence, and they are all equally driven by animalistic instincts. And yes, I have watched the most disturbing, controversial, and gore movies but the rape scene and the overall scenes with those male characters made me shiver with terror and disgust; I had a hard time watching those scenes.

'The Darknesss Within Me Exists in You too, Sayara.'

The death of purity steps closer and heavier after the hard-to-watch scene of her sister's murder. Sayara's silent screams add depth to the unspoken evil that lurks in the streets.

The disturbing story of the first half of the movie leaves the room for a bad-ass revenge flick where Sayara is horrifyingly reminded of her covered, secretive and repressed instincts, her drives and her own evil that comes within her soul. An anti-hero, she is now releasing the repressed urges that she has kept captivated for too long. The daughter of a Soviet Sambo champion who was a commander back in the day, Sayara's childhood is filled with bitter-sweet memories of the times when her father trained her to defend herself and protect her mother and sister from the outside. Knowing that he wouldn't make it long, his father saw the shared darkness and trained Sayara like an agent before committing suicide.

So step by step, we are getting closer to Sayara's revenge flick. Cutting her own hair and remembering what her father used to say, Sayara is now ready to take her revenge on everyone: including the innocent and the criminal. She arrives at the place.. Fighting one-on-one... As a martial-arts-based film, the last sequence and Sayara's killing moves must have been ingrained in your bones. A gory and well-deserved revenge, Sayara brutally fights against them and takes her on revenge one by one. Burning to death, Barış and Sayara die together with the flames of burdens of living, burdens of the crash of life drive and death drive. The crash between her life drive and death collapses now as the tension leaves its place to death, leaving nothing but the urge to destroy, and self-destruct.

So Sayara, an avenging angel, not only delivers a feast of gore cinema but also delivers a profoundly crucial message. You can take on a psychoanalytical approach, a feminist criticism, or a structuralist criticism but what is objective is the fact that Sayara is a film that boldly criticizes the essence of life and brutally delivers the untold, hidden horrors in it.