Tags like a cop movie, police drama, detective thriller, murder mystery are absolutely misleading here. This film is none of the above. The ongoing police investigation is just a background of the portrayal of life in a provincial Turkish town and rural areas around it. This life is dreary, dull and boring but Ceylan shows it so masterfully you are totally captivated by the narrative. The people are talking dreary, dull and boring things but those are their everyday matters. There's no grandiloquence, no prettification, no message, no hidden meaning, only Ceylan's perfect realism, his trademark.
For completists - the prosecutor's story about his wife committing suicide is borrowed from a Chekhov's short story The Examining Magistrate
Review of Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
