Director: Alper Mestçi
Year: 2025
Country: Turkey
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Supernatural
Plot:
After moving into their grandmother’s home, a family trying to move on with their lives is inundated with a slew of supernatural activity following the move and discovers that they’ve triggered a powerful curse for what they’ve done, forcing them to find a spiritual figure capable of stopping it.
Review:
For the most part, this was a fairly solid and enjoyable genre effort. Among the better factors to be had here is the immensely likable setup that manages to offer up a generally fun starting point for the ensuing series of supernatural action to emerge. The first half manages to accomplish the wholly enjoyable task of setting up the story and the central premise quite nicely, with the family moving into the house shortly after moving the grandmother into the old-folks’ home so that they can have a fresh start at life, which is a fun way to start this one, with it introducing the concept of spiritual balance. These first few encounters prompt the family to bring her back to live with them in an attempt to ease the situation, but instead escalating matters into a full-blown haunting, managing a wholly intriguing idea of a haunting storyline that ends up taking place here.
This is played off rather well with the actual setpieces showing the haunting taking place throughout here. The initial sequences with hair being found in food, visions of the deformed, ghastly elderly figures popping out at various points throughout the house, or haunting screams of demonic beings beside an individual create a solid enough baseline for the ensuing series of hauntings following this to come about. Focused on the continued usage of characters stumbling upon a figure they believe to be one person but instead revealed to be someone else who can either control the objects around them, manipulate their surroundings to appear out of them at random, or eventually possess them entirely, this presentation creates a non-stop barrage of jump-scares to emerge following these encounters. Several of these, including the reveal of the grandmother at the piano or the final attempt at exorcising the demonic entity, are incredibly brutal as well, giving the film quite a lot to like overall.
There are some issues here that keep this down. One of the main problematic areas of this one is the singular idea that the old or elderly are terrifying seems to run rampant throughout the film, featuring plenty of scenes reliant on the visual of an old-age figure wandering into frame unexpectedly and causing some sort of strife in the person’s life. Almost all of the visions and hallucinations related to the haunting are based on the deformed, garish older grandmother with demonic intonations in their makeup, being made out to be someone they should avoid or heed caution around, with how their actions simply screaming demonically in someone’s face or just sitting there ominously, waiting for someone to notice the patently possessed nature of their appearance. This makes for a rather underwhelming idea here when very little of the film’s haunting scenes change their appearance or presentation, giving it all a rather repetitive atmosphere.
As well, there’s also the big issue here that tends to run rampant through the whole franchise in repeating the same style and presentation for how to finally bring the curse to an end. What had been presented as a fine way to go about getting the family afflicted with the curse and brought into the supernatural realms, with the series of incidents depicting the initial start of the demonic hauntings and supernatural visions that take place, instead becomes quite heavily reliant on the intrusion of a special priest with the capabilities of fighting off the spirits. This is something that just about everything in the series has gone through, and this one is no exception, taking a really familiar route and going through the same process and presentation once again without differentiating from anything else in the franchise, and with some issues in the somewhat longer running time than it really needs, bring this one down overall.
Overview: ****/5
A generally likable and effective franchise sequel, there are a lot of enjoyable elements to this one to make for a fun time and hold it up, despite a few slight drawbacks keeping this one down. Those with an interest in this approach, who are fans of the other entries in the series or the creative crew, will have a lot to like here, while most others out there should heed caution.
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