Baskin

A man sticks a knife into the eye of a police offi­cer. He repeat­ed­ly stabs it, then pro­ceeds to lick the blood from the blade, rel­ish­ing in the taste of his lat­est vic­tim. This is Baskin, the lat­est from Turk­ish genre direc­tor Can Evrenol. His film piv­ots around five police offi­cers sum­moned to an aban­doned build­ing in Incea­gac, a town pre­ced­ed by its unset­tling rep­u­ta­tion. There, they descend stairs down to what can only be described as Hell. Not for the faint heart­ed, Baskin makes for a tru­ly grue­some, masochis­tic study of the thin line between heroes and anti-heroes.

From the out­set, Baskin (which trans­lates as ​‘raid’) adapts the eerie, con­ven­tion­al hor­ror set with the flick­er­ing of lights, dim­ly lit rooms and the hon­ing in on ampli­fied sounds. Frogs (con­sid­ered doom-bringers in mythol­o­gy) fre­quent­ly appear, insin­u­at­ing the omi­nous direc­tion of the film. The police offi­cers arrive and are ready to attack their unknown threat, but as the film pro­gress­es it becomes abun­dant­ly clear that they’re the ones being threat­ened. An ear­ly scene shows the police offi­cers at a din­ner, crude­ly dis­cussing their pre­dic­tion for pros­ti­tutes. This vul­gar­i­ty imme­di­ate­ly makes it hard for view­ers to take a shine to them, cor­re­spond­ing with Evrenol’s inten­tions to engi­neer a stand-off between some bad guys and some even bad­der guys.

Large­ly filmed from the viewer’s per­spec­tive, Baskin metic­u­lous­ly forces you to wit­ness every gut-wrench­ing moment. Shak­ing cam­eras height­en the inten­si­ty of flee­ing scenes that switch fre­quent­ly from the hunters to the hunt­ed. Guid­ed by the sounds of drum­ming and haunt­ing chimes, sus­pense builds as the film gains momen­tum. Dingy and derelict aban­doned cells shift to close-ups of bru­talised chained bod­ies hang­ing from blood-smeared walls.

It’s at this moment that Baskin tru­ly comes into its own, with ani­mal­is­tic beings butcher­ing the deceased and toss­ing their guts to the floor where many of them crawl on all fours like beasts, scrap­ing at the dirt with their blood­ied hands. ​“Hell is not a place you go. You car­ry Hell with you at all times,” are the haunt­ing words of a tor­tur­er to one of his vic­tims, just moments before stab­bing a clawed fin­ger into his open gut wound, caus­ing him to bleed pro­fuse­ly from the mouth. At the hands of Evrenol, Hell may be car­ried with you for some sleep­less nights to come.