As more and more films are released simultaneously in cinemas and on VOD, it’s worth asking whether some movies are better suited to one medium than the other. This week, Turkish indie horror Baskin – out yesterday on screens both big and small – offers an answer: though the film has proved a runaway success at horror festivals and midnight screenings, it turns out to be a strikingly different film at home.
In its opening scenes, we meet a gang of cavalier cops whose meal at a dingy, off-the-grid restaurant is interrupted by a mysterious call for back-up. For now, the film maintains the feel of a darkly comic police thriller – presumably to the confusion of viewers familiar with its extremist horror reputation – and therefore translates just fine to a laptop screen.
After the men stumble upon an eerie, disused police station, however, Baskin executes a staggering tonal shift that renders the film less well-suited to home viewing. Upon entering the building, the officers find themselves in what appears to be a literal hell: a subterranean network of grotesque supernatural torture chambers overseen by a demonic figure named The Father, who looks disconcertingly like the mechanical ceiling baby from Trainspotting all grown up.
This nightmarish labyrinth is genuinely, revoltingly horrific: all writhing bodies, gushing fluids and don’t-even-know-what-I’m-looking-at spectacle. Director Can Evrenol fashions his seventh circle in tones that Hieronymus Bosch might have found excessively macabre, and reduces his previously braggadocious characters to monosyllabic wrecks, doomed to cry out hopelessly in non-comprehension at their sudden change in fortune.
Those who watch the film at home may sympathise. As the bloodletting continues, it soon becomes apparent that Baskin intends to keep viewers in the belly of its beast for quite some time, with only The Father’s clunky attempts at profundity (“Hell is not a place you go, you carry hell with you at all times”) and a few wilfully inscrutable narrative twists by way of plot development.
I suspect that’s because Evrenol knows the movie’s lengthy scenes of grotesquery will go down a treat at crowded theatrical screenings, where disembowelings are liable to be met with enthusiastic cries of revulsion. The film even seems to leave breathing space for such reactions, ensuring quieter viewings on VOD are punctuated by dramatic downtime. For all the suffocating gore, it’s an oddly airy vision of inferno.
