Year: 2024

Runtime: 84 minutes

Written and directed by: Selman Nacar

Starring: Tülin Özen, Gulcin Kultur Sahin, Ogulcan Arman Uslu 

By Sarah Manvel

“Hesitation Wound” tries to have its cake and eat it. That is to say, it tries to show a criminal lawyer in a small Turkish city both as a person and a professional, but only manages to short-change her twice. Both aspects of the plot deserved their own time to develop, but neither were allowed to, causing the entire confection to fall flat.

Canan (Tülin Özen) has recently returned to her hometown because her mother has fallen into a coma and is only being kept on life support to encourage Canan and her sister Belgin (Gulcin Kultur Sahin) to donate her organs. It’s clear in their brief scenes together that the sisters resent each other enormously: Canan was the clever success who travelled internationally and sent money back, while Belgin stayed and built a family of her own. It’s Belgin who is ready to let their mother go and Canan’s who’s refusing. But while she prevaricates, she is also working on a court case, defending a troubled young man named Musa (Ogulcan Arman Uslu) on trial for murdering the owner of the factory where he previously worked. There’s plenty of evidence against him, but plenty of evidence that other evidence has been suppressed, and Canan is on a race against time there, too.

This means the time spent on Canan parking her car and buying cigarettes is an amateur distraction from the core story. Yes, ordinary life does go on in even the most complex circumstances, but come on. It’s also a surprise that Canan is working while navigating such a complex personal situation and more so that writer-director Selman Nacar failed to provide an explanation of why this is necessary other than for plot purposes. Ms Özen does solid work here, especially in the courtroom scenes, of showing her cast-iron commitment to doing her best for her client, but if this is a metaphor it’s so overwrought it’s unclear.

Speaking of metaphors: the title. Musa has a past record of minor criminality making him an ideal fall guy, and he’s not coping with the possibility of a life sentence. His arms are covered in scars from attempts to gee himself up to commit suicide in case he is convicted, but when he shows them to Canan he gives her an idea for a new line of defense. If this has any relationship to Canan’s inability to let go of her mother, well. It’s such a shame that “Hesitation Wound” didn’t give Canan’s relationships with both her client and her sister space to breathe, thereby allowing the full meaning of the metaphor better room to unfurl and enable the drama to be more properly felt. As it is, this is just the setup for Mr Nacar’s next movie to be the most effective one.