The Funeral (Glasgow Frightfest 2024) (Review)

One question that will never receive a positive answer is “how was the funeral?” Sure, they can be pleasant experiences that celebrate the life of a loved one, but they’re always sad, potentially traumatic days. Enter The Funeral from Turkish director Ocrun Behram, which played at 2024’s Glasgow Frightfest the weekend just gone. He takes this gloomy event and touches upon folk horror, cannibals, serial killer-thrillers and the road trip drama to turn out a fascinating mish-mash of genres – albeit divisive due to its slow tempo and evasion of easy answers. 

Ahmet Rifat Sungar is Cemal, a depressive funeral driver who’s summoned one night for a very unconventional job offer – to take the body of a crime family’s daughter and get lost in the Turkish countryside for a month. Justifiably suspicious that he’s getting set up as a patsy, his qualms are just about satisfied and he reluctantly takes on this grim role – only she isn’t quite as dead as suggested. After hearing noises coming from his hearse (which looks like a bog standard van to British eyes), and experiencing a surreal out-of-body nightmare, he retrieves Zeynep’s (Cansu Türedi), body and moves it to his motel room. To nurse her back to health Cemal needs to feed her flesh – his own at first, but as that’s unsustainable he takes to casually murdering people he crosses paths with to use as food for his charge’s rehabilitation. Underneath this already grim tale is a folk horror contextualisation in the shape of the titular ceremony, waking dreams, and flashbacks peppered scarcely throughout.

Just a few short days after its debut, there are points of contention with The Funeral that make it more interesting than people are giving it credit for, the first being the belief that the relationship between Zeynep and Cemal is one born of attraction, and that’s certainly a take on events. However, there doesn’t really seem to be any implication that this is true, their relationship being more one of obligation and duty bordering on Stockholm syndrome, and their rapport is one of reluctant provider and dependent who are ultimately stuck together.

Secondly, people are characterising Zeynep as a zombie (as if that creature is the only one that can come back from the dead), which is incorrect, especially within the Islamic and Arab worlds. I therefore propose that The Funeral is in fact a Ghoul movie (specifically “mother ghoul”), a creature that feeds off the flesh off the living and the dead, and can often be found in graveyards – and given that Cemal is a funeral driver, it’s a connection worth making. Additionally, being a ghoul movie makes it much more interesting than the swarm of identikit zombie movies haunting horror culture.

There are other creative strings to The Funeral‘s bow, namely the cinematography and music, and there can be no sugar-coating here – cinematographer Engin Özkaya has intentionally made an ugly movie. The colour palette and grading show a world of depressed, worn-out buildings shot with isolating wide angles and choppy handheld camerawork, and while it’s more stable and conventional during the abstract dream sequences, this is still a ghoul movie shot with a realist edge. Even the lighting (and there’s very little in the way of stylised light), is all-natural – or at least designed to give that impression. There’s also no score, and the only time we hear an added musical element is during the credits.

This is a minimalist horror movie through and through.

Minimalism will always be tied to slow cinema, and The Funeral is certainly that, primarily because of who the leads are – one, a living dead girl who doesn’t say a word and the most noise we get from her are rasps, screams and breathing through her nose, while the other is a depressed man who isn’t a sparkling conversationalist. Their quiet natures allow the atmosphere to come to the fore, and it’s through this that Ocrun Behram’s movie becomes oppressively scary, as instead of the cast being the mouthpiece for what is happening, this dank, miserable movie allows the silence to do all the talking. Like Kill List (even though the cast is more talkative there), nothing really happens for great stretches of time in The Funeral, but there’s an uneasiness that hangs in the air that’s far more upsetting than any number of jump scares. If I were to characterise where this fearful aura comes from, I’d say it was an absence of hope that encompasses both Zeynep and Cemal’s mind and fate.

Stylistically, The Funeral is an oppressive antidote to tired tropes that lead to a messy and anarchic finale that doesn’t exactly pay off on the glimmers of a backstory. It instead presents a culmination of its themes, with a dead alive girl returning to others what had been done to her, but only knowing information through fragments hurts the movie, especially when the idea of the slow burn is to pay off with a cathartic ending (in horror, at least). The folk horror is sporadic at best – with little happening for long stretches of the film, and it’s gory in a way that many cannibal movies are, but even though the expressionist near-silent performances of its cast are perfect for the script, it’s still a hard sell. Even as someone who appreciated this Glasgow Frightfest title a great deal, at 110 minutes it feels too drawn out and slow – a 90 minute cut of this would work beautifully and make this is an even more compellingly oppressive horror oddity for those willing to do the hunting on the fringes of world cinema.

Rob’s Archive – The Funeral (2023)