THE FUNERAL (2024)

Deeply depressed and stuck in a dead-end job as a hearse driver, Cemal isn’t exactly in a healthy place. But his endlessly dull daily grind is coming to a halt when asked to fulfill a rather peculiar task. A young woman, Zeynep, has been brutally murdered, but her family prefers not to go through the usual funeral mumbo-jumbo. No, they’d rather have him pick up the corpse in his truck and disappear for a month. Morally questionable? Perhaps, but that has never stopped Cemal from earning a quick buck. Once said corpse shoved in his van though, something feels off. Is that breathing he hears through the body bag? Impossible, her pulse is deader than a doorknob! And yet there she is, looking at him with pitch-black eyes and a strong appetite… for human flesh! Taking a bite off his shoulder brings back a little color in her cheeks, but after a couple of days going about it this way it’s clear to Cemal she craves more than he can bodily provide for her. So he decides to set off on a little journey with her, looking for fresh prey…
Director Orçun Behram’s second feature (after 2019’s THE ANTENNA) is so utterly bleak and hopeless that the only person capable of injecting a little bit of love and tenderness in the protagonist’s life is a mute undead corpse with a lust for blood. A lust he lovingly caters to by hunting down unsuspecting victims along the desolate road, not unlike a similarly disturbed young man in Joe D’Amato’s BEYOND THE DARKNESS. And in its own dark, twisted, truly original and occasionally gut-wrenching way? That’s actually pretty heart-warming in this cruel, cruel world.