Honey Review

This final instalment in Turkish director Semih Kaplanoglu’s trilogy (previous episodes: Egg, Milk) follows Yusuf (Bora Altas) as a child, charting his relationship with his honey-gatherer dad Yakup (Erdal Besikcioglu), his torment at school over his stutter and the dramatic way these strands come together. There is some lovely, lyrical Malick-esque stuff here — Yakup climbing tall trees to reach the bee hives, Yusuf playing with the moon’s reflection in a pail of water — but for all the beauty on show, it never really grabs you emotionally or brings the characters’ inner life to the fore. While it also loses focus in the middle, it delivers a strong finale, resulting in an intermittently absorbing but always beautiful entry into the Euro-director-grows-up-in-a-small-village sub-genre.