A perennial, almost metaphysical layer of grime settles on every surface in Zeki Demirkubuz’s "Innocence". This is not the dust of time, but the sediment of the soul, the patina left by lives consumed in a feverish stasis. Demirkubuz’s cinema, and this 1997 masterpiece in particular, doesn't merely depict the sordid; it elevates it to an existential condition, to the only visible horizon for its characters, prisoners not so much of a cell as of an obsession that has become destiny. Yusuf, released after ten years in prison, emerges into a world he no longer recognizes, a ghost wandering in search of an anchor. He finds it, or thinks he does, in a squalid Izmir boarding house, a non-place that is the film’s true pulsating—and necrotic—heart. This boarding house is no simple backdrop; it is a character in its own right: a Dantean circle for mediocre souls, a labyrinth of corridors and rooms where every door opens not onto a new space, but onto a different permutation of the same, identical despair.

It is here that Yusuf, a silent spectator and our gateway to this inferno, meets the broken-down couple that drives the narrative: Bekir and Uğur. And if Yusuf is our catatonic Virgil, they are the Francesca and Paolo of this earthly tempest, bound together not by love but by a pathological bond that has long since transcended any affective logic. Bekir, a superb Haluk Bilginer in a performance that plumbs the abyss of human dignity, lives solely for Uğur. His is not devotion, but a form of self-annihilation, a voluntary servitude that compels him to follow her across Turkey, to tolerate every humiliation, to finance her life as a seedy nightclub singer and occasional prostitute. Uğur, for her part, lives for another man, a criminal named Zagor, an almost mythological entity who looms over the film like a gangster’s Godot, whose absence is more powerful than any presence. Thus a daisy chain of unrequited desire is formed, an impossible triangle where love is not a creative force but a black hole that devours everything.

The most immediate, and almost obligatory, point of reference for deciphering Demirkubuz’s cinema is Fyodor Dostoevsky. "Innocence" is not merely Dostoevskian in spirit; it is an almost literal transposition of that particular fever of the soul that pervades the pages of The Idiot or Notes from Underground. Demirkubuz’s characters are Turkish "men from the underground," whose lucidity in diagnosing their own sickness only aggravates its symptoms. They talk, they confess, they unburden themselves in long monologues that tear through the veil of realism to arrive at a deeper, almost theatrical truth. And here, one must pause on the film's pivotal scene, perhaps one of the greatest monologues in modern cinema. Seated at a table, before a plate of food he will not touch, Bekir launches into a torrential, near-ten-minute stream of consciousness, filmed in a single, suffocating long take. It is his "j'accuse" against destiny, against God, against love itself, which he describes not as a feeling but as a "filth" that has stuck to him and that he cannot wash away. In this momentous scene, Bilginer does not act: he officiates a rite of verbal self-immolation, exposing the perverse logic of his obsession with terrifying clarity. It is a moment that transcends cinema, becoming pure filmed literature, a tour de force that would alone justify seeing the film, evoking the existential despair of a Bergman character trapped in the body of an everyman, in a dive bar in a provincial Turkish city.

"Innocence" arrived at a crucial moment for Turkish cinema. It was the late 1990s, and a new generation of auteurs, including Nuri Bilge Ceylan, was redefining the national cinematic identity. But where Ceylan looks to Chekhov and the metaphysical breadth of the Anatolian landscapes, Demirkubuz shuts himself in interiors, in the urban underbelly, looking to Dostoevsky and noir. His style is spare, anti-aesthetic. The cinematography is almost documentary-like, the colors faded, the shots fixed, claustrophobic. This choice is not sloppiness, but a precise poetic declaration: there is no escape, neither for the characters nor for the spectator. We are trapped with them in those hotel rooms, forced to breathe their same stale air, to feel the weight of their motionless time. The film strips away all ornament to get to the incandescent core of human drama. In this, Demirkubuz is closer to a Fassbinder, with his ruthless analysis of power dynamics in interpersonal relationships, than to his Turkish contemporaries. As in the best Fassbinderian melodramas, love is a perverse economy of domination and submission, and happiness an ontological impossibility.

The title, "Innocence," is the film's supreme, cruel irony. Where does innocence reside in this world? Perhaps in Çilem, Uğur’s deaf-mute daughter, the silent witness to this decay. Her physical condition becomes a metaphor for an entire human condition: the impossibility of communicating, of hearing and being heard. Çilem is the only one permitted not to participate in the adults’ verbal bloodbath, but her silence is not purity; it is a void that reflects and amplifies the desperate cacophony surrounding her. Or perhaps the innocent one is Yusuf, whose passivity makes him almost a blank slate onto which the passions of others are projected. But his inaction is a choice, a form of complicity that makes him just as guilty of his own paralysis. Innocence, Demirkubuz suggests, is not the absence of guilt, but perhaps the state of one who has not yet contracted the disease of obsession—an illness that, in his universe, is as contagious as the plague.

Ultimately, "Innocence" is a film about the nature of freedom. Yusuf leaves one prison only to enter a larger one: that of human dynamics. Bekir is free to leave at any moment, but is chained to Uğur by a bond stronger than any steel bar. Uğur is a slave to the phantom of Zagor. They are fatalistic characters who have abdicated their own free will and surrendered themselves to a higher power they call "love" but which more closely resembles a life sentence. The ending, cyclical and devastating, offers neither catharsis nor redemption, but only the confirmation that some stories are fated to repeat themselves endlessly, like a broken record playing the same melancholy song. It is a ruthless, demanding work that denies any easy consolation. One does not "enjoy" a film like "Innocence". One endures it, wrestles with it, and emerges changed, with the unpleasant but necessary awareness that sometimes hell is not some otherworldly place, but a cheap hotel room where the very thing keeping us alive is also the one that’s killing us. An absolute masterpiece, bleak and magnificent.