I think it’s safe to say that we’ve all seen the trailer for Can Evrenol’s Turkish horror Baskin, about a squad of unsuspecting cops that go through a trapdoor to Hell when they stumble upon a Black Mass in an abandoned police station.
The footage is hard-hitting – a rush of adrenaline that’s filled to the brim with gore. It sells something that Baskin is not. I tell you this not as a negative, but as a way of leveling your expectations.
Baskin is more of a character piece that’s constructed around a concept that sends the several police offers to Hell. Behind this device, there’s an attempt to build rich characters through slow-burn storytelling, which at times is surprisingly captivating. While Baskin is extremely exposition heavy, Evrenol builds dread and suspense around every set piece through his distinguished vision behind the camera. The dark color palettes and bleak set design only enhance an already spine-tingling tale.
So, no, Baskin isn’t that Event Horizon trip to Hell we were all expecting, it’s instead a slow-paced horror fairytale that you tell bad children at bedtime to scare them into being good.
It takes a long time get into the abandoned station, but once we’re there Baskin takes on the spirit of Clive Barker’s Hellraiser, filling the screen with all kind of nightmarish imagery. At times it feels as if Evrenol is trying too hard to shock the audience, throwing so much oddity and obscurity it’s hard to know if there’s actual backstory to any of it. Still, if Evrenol is going to take the viewer into the depths of Hell, it feels as if he should be taking it as far as he can.
I’m not quite sure the film fully delivers on its promise, and the big reveal feels razor thin. Still, Baskin has cult midnight written all over it. It’s the kind of arthouse horror that becomes a household name among genre fans. It’s so shocking (at times) and so astoundingly well made that, if anything, I think it puts an exclamation stamp next to Can Evrenol’s name as one of the futures of horror.
