You don’t need to know much about the criminal justice system to understand its broken, biased, and grim nightmare— unfair, unjust, unforgiving, a bureaucratic Kafka-esque hellscape you never want to be trapped within. Turkish filmmaker Selman Nacar (“Between Two Dawns”) understands this all too well—he was a law student for several years before switching to filmmaking and saw all the flaws in the legal justice system firsthand. His suspenseful new moral, legal drama, and character study, “Hesitation Wounds,” is proficiently crafted with a fittingly claustrophobic and inhospitable quality.
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Compressed into a stressful 24 hours which plays out like a thriller, Nacar’s drama is also pitched in the vein of the Romanian New Wave, reminiscent of minimalist, spare, matter-of-fact moral thrillers by filmmakers like Cristian Mungiu, Cristi Puiu, and Alexandru Belc. Nacar even borrows these director’s accomplished cinematographer, Tudor Vladimir Panduru, for a similarly cold and austere aesthetic that makes it all the more bleak and despairing. “Hesitations Wounds” is somber in a way that its downbeat color temperatures surely portend tragedy for everyone involved.
And “Hesitation Wounds” doesn’t hide its misfortunes and the heartbreaks to come. The film’s tightly focused frame is on Canan (an exceptional Tülin Özen), a criminal lawyer who divides her time between the courthouse by day and her dying mother’s hospital bed at night. In her seemingly thankless defense lawyer vocation, she is the public defender assisting Musa (Oğulcan Arman Uslu), a man on trial accused of murdering his local factory boss. While Canan is more than capable—having studied abroad at a fancy school that the judges seem to resent and even throw petty references to—that deck seems all too stacked against her client despite some flimsy and substantial-at-best evidence that reeks of corruption.
Patient, with a conscious sense of space and mise en scene for sequences mostly shot in small, crowded rooms, “Hesitation Wounds” trudges through a lot of banalities of the legal and courtroom process—even stopping for a cruel moment of levity when a leaking pipe breaks through the ceiling and interrupts the process. It’s a twisted gallows humor moment, though; the audience and the courtroom may get a moment of reprieve, but for Musa, it just feels like a perverse indignity and delay of the inevitable. Meanwhile, while Canan pushes the difficult boulder of her case uphill, she must visit her dying mother, laying waste on life support.
Before the monotony of this process threatens to numb the viewer into oblivion—Canan seemingly defending her client in vain to hard-hearted judges who seem to have made up their mind from the jump—Nacar’s screenplay gives a brief moment of hope in a new witness that may provide new, last-minute exonerating testimony. But what eventually ensues is an admission of guilt that emotionally unravels the lawyer and will seemingly have consequences on her life beyond the outcome of Musa’s fate.
Unsympathetic ignominies litter the drama: a car with a gas leak, and a protagonist under great strain suffering from a lack of sleep and an ulcer on top of all she is grappling with. When a doctor friend tells Canan, “Try to avoid stress,” it just seems like just another joke lacking humanity.
Desolate, poorly lit courtroom offices give way to the indifferent fluorescent glare of hospital lights. Making matters worse and told narratively in parallel to the courtroom drama, Canan’s mother, having suffered brain death, is in a vegetative coma. If the lawyer can’t reconcile with her mother’s wishes—pull the plug if she is incapable—then the much-needed organs she had already agreed to donate will be useless to the nervously awaiting transplantee in need.
The emotional intensity of each situation bleeds into the other, coloring decisions that might normally be shaped intellectually, with tinges of desperation and irrational choices on the part of the otherwise sharp and stoic Canan. Either way, none of it will likely end well—not that Nacar will be so blunt, clumsy, and obvious about that, letting the viewer fill in the spaces for the irrevocable truths we know the characters cannot recover from.
Moreover, at its center, “Hesitation Wounds” has a great instrument in its lead, Tülin Özen. Conveying an overwhelming moral responsibility for her client and her mother but burdened quietly inside, her riveting turn is full of subtle anguish, a raised dignity in the face of unsurmountable challenges, a certain level of haughty pride the character holds, and others abhor, and the despair of acceptance. But this intricate, subtly escalating symphony of moral dilemmas, ethical quandaries, and internal heartbreak is told with great confidence and conviction, concluding with a chillingly operatic sequence expressing fate and inescapability.
Nacar’s “Between Two Dawns” also played out in 24 hours and featured similarly-themed probing examinations of ethics, morality, choices, and consequences. “Hesitation Wounds” ends with a masterfully inimical closing shot that signals a filmmaker deeply in control of his craft. It’s arguably midlly out of step with the rest of the movie, but so striking, the bold choice is easy to forgive. Nacar’s forbidding drama might be too ascetic for the average moviegoer, but for the discerning cineaste who counts figures like Bilge Ceylan, Farhadi, and Mungiu among their favorites, his will be a name they’ll want to know and likely soon prize in the same way. [B+]
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