Most of the Eastern European cinema that makes it over the ocean to US theatres is of the depressing and brutally color-washed variety (see 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days), and this is no exception. Cannes winner for Best Director award, the Turkish film Three Monkeys features a family breaking down from one bad decision following the next. It all starts out with the father deciding to take the fall for a politician involved in a hit-and-run. Then, as the mother gets involved with the politician and the son gets sick, the three of them begin to slowly lose themselves in dysfunction and mis-aimed hatred, building long and subtly into a dramatic tension that never really bursts, but does begin to fill each frame with uncomfortable alacrity. This is the type of movie where you get so involved in the long, methodical takes that you don't notice when it suddenly becomes nearly unbearable to watch these people being so self-destructive, and you realize that, unaccountably, you're completely hooked.
An interesting device running throughout the movie is of visitors--not visitors of the neighborly "come over and hang out" variety, but trains, weather, and phone calls interjecting each scene like an unwanted guest, stabbing into the (typically) non-conversation the characters are having and eating away communication like corrosive acid. Then there's the visitor of the dead brother, who comes to comfort the characters at various, incredibly uncanny, points.
This is the exact type of movie that most audiences would have a hard time with because it's "slow", but nevertheless there are some scenes so filled with dark energy that it's hard to remember the movie as much more as an electrifying experience. Of particular interest is the mother, whose face reaches the scowling limits of the term "if looks could kill" almost literalized. As much as the cinematography and blocking were fun to look at, this movie eventually became the actors' movies, all considerations of what's going on otherwise lost in the way each one of them somehow managed to have expressions that wouldn't move all while the muscles under their faces writhed and twitched like snakes. Watch that scene as the mother stares over the sea-side again and note how she is not moving at all, but every muscle in her body is going haywire.
An interesting device running throughout the movie is of visitors--not visitors of the neighborly "come over and hang out" variety, but trains, weather, and phone calls interjecting each scene like an unwanted guest, stabbing into the (typically) non-conversation the characters are having and eating away communication like corrosive acid. Then there's the visitor of the dead brother, who comes to comfort the characters at various, incredibly uncanny, points.
This is the exact type of movie that most audiences would have a hard time with because it's "slow", but nevertheless there are some scenes so filled with dark energy that it's hard to remember the movie as much more as an electrifying experience. Of particular interest is the mother, whose face reaches the scowling limits of the term "if looks could kill" almost literalized. As much as the cinematography and blocking were fun to look at, this movie eventually became the actors' movies, all considerations of what's going on otherwise lost in the way each one of them somehow managed to have expressions that wouldn't move all while the muscles under their faces writhed and twitched like snakes. Watch that scene as the mother stares over the sea-side again and note how she is not moving at all, but every muscle in her body is going haywire.