By Sofia Majstorovic

“This snow just won’t melt away. I wonder what shame it’s hiding under it,” says Refik, one of many men whose bear encounter structures the rumour mill at the centre of writer-director Selcen Ergun’s debut feature Snow and the Bear. Played carefully and quietly by Merve Dizdar, newcomer Aslı (or “Miss Nurse”) is airdropped into a flurry of provincial gossip beset by a prolonged winter that has produced a series of disappearances attributed to “deranged” and “aggressive” bears. Amongst the only citizens who do not jump to blame the “beast” are Samet and his parents, deeply religious characters whose knowledge of the forest seems to protect them from worldly indulgences and violence. 

A hovering sense of environmental catastrophe is foregrounded at the film’s outset by a radio segment discussing America’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement (perhaps the only unambiguous reference in the entire movie). Combined with the feeling that something is not quite right in the woods, Samet’s designation by his peers as a “half-wit” jimmies up the folkloric trappings of movies like M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village (2004). Despite suspicion and exile from the acting patriarchy, Samet’s ability to diagnose the diseased minds of his community settles in step with Aslı’s actual role as a nurse in the rural Turkish town where she’s doing compulsory service. Adding to Snow and the Bear’s horror-genre play is the potent claustrophobia of its location, with the opening itself paying homage to the infamous tracking shot that funneled audiences into the unceasing winter of The Shining (1980). 

The geographical and dramatic tightness of Ergun’s film is a welcome change from the politically explicit and didactic terms of most foreign films lauded by the West. Ergun wisely displays no submission to a moral narrative style; depravity and cruelty are instead represented by things unsaid and actions unseen (all the better to engage our imaginations). Aslı gradually becomes a ghostly onlooker to her community’s blind genuflection to the gun as a way to control nature and thus violence; this insidious twinning of spectatorship and complicity will certainly reverberate beyond her director’s home turf of Turkey.