Ever wondered what life would be like growing up in the back of a converted East German truck with an alcoholic con man for a father, a practicing witch doctor for a mum, and your father’s second wife who’s probably young enough to be your sister. Well, here’s your chance to experience it. Join the crazy road trip in Suleiman Mountain.
A day after Hakan finds out his wife Nihal cannot conceive, she disappears. The last time he saw her was entering an apartment with a man he doesn’t recognize. In his attempts to find her, he brazenly follows the clues to discover things about his wife that he struggles to come to terms with. In order to find her, he has to dispel his idea of a happy marriage.
The film spends a lot of time building up ambiguous clues, which puts more pressure on a grand reveal to deliver the resolution. Unfortunately it builds expectations so high that when the reveal strikes, it isn’t overly surprising or well thought out. The reveal contradicts a lot of what has been done and said from the first half so it has to revisit every part of it to show you how it matches. The reveal does answer some of the questions from the first half but does leave a lot unanswered, as the second half effectively completely rewrites the first act of the film in a quarter of the time. As a result, it feels rushed and almost unbelievable.
That being said, the film deserves credit for portraying domestic violence. It first portrays a violent but innocent man that we can sympathize with and then a man capable of domestic violence. What is clear is that these two perspectives of the same man are indeed the same man. Just as domestic violence perpetrators are ‘normal’ humans by appearance, but violent husbands at home. If only the rest of the script could have held together through the two parts.
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