My notes on Cenaze (The Funeral) (2023)
An interesting Turkish horror/road movie from Orcun Behram, director of The Antenna. Cemal (Ahmet Rifat Sungar), a glum and alienated guy who drives an inter-city hearse, is offered a dodgy deal – to take the corpse of a young woman murdered by her family in an honour killing and get lost for about a month. Despite not getting answers to any of his questins, Cemal takes the envelope of cash and drives off with Zeynep (Cansu Turedi) in a body bag in the refrigerated back of the van. She has an obvious headwound – but starts breathing raspily, plainly not as dead as was promised … though it becomes obvious from her feeding habits (biting chunks out of her chauffeur) that she’s not really alive either. Cenaze falls in with a clutch of films (Bitten, The Insatiable, Bled, Habit) about Renfield-types who enter into co-dependent relationships with vampires of one strain or another. Zeynep is too traumatised by what was done to her to speak – or explain herself – and Cemal is too fixated on her and his new mission in life not to become a serial killer by proxy, feeding chunks of bar-room bore to her and desperately reconnecting with his sister to find a place to hole up. Meanwhile, bad dreams/visions hint at Zeynep’s backstory – involving a clan of cultists in cloth masks – and suggest what might happen at her long-delayed, unconventional funeral. Cenaze is a gruesome atmosphere piece, with a pair of taciturn, agonised leads who make a great impression onscreen – though it’s hard to tell whether Cemal worships the revenant or is enslaved by her or just needs an excuse to treat people as cuts of meat to be bloodily chopped up. It offers an interesting, unusual sketch of its vampire and her extended clan – just as Cemal can’t quite work out what’s going on, we never quite get what their whole story is.
Here’s the FrightFest listing.
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