Loosely based on Albert Camus’ The Outsider, this is the first film in Turkish director Zeki Demirkubuz’s Tales About Darkness trilogy. It’s a bleakly comic story, in which customs clerk Serdar Orcin haplessly accepts everything fate throws at him — whether the death of his mother, the vengeful antics of a neighbour, marriage to his boss’ secretary-mistress or imprisonment for a murder he didn’t commit.
Such existentialist passivity might prove as puzzling to some as it does to the prison governor in the droll but lengthy philosophical finale, but Orcin’s innocent is the ambivalent embodiment of human frailty in a world in which fewer people take responsibility for their actions. Moreover, there’s a sweetness about his relationship with faithless wife, Zeynep Tokus.