Kasaba: the Turkish noir series on Netflix

Two brothers reunite after years apart in the small provincial town where they grew up, forced to return for their mother's funeral. Efe left the town for Istanbul to pursue his dreams, while Selim stayed behind, trapped in that claustrophobic reality of immutable habits and limited horizons. With them is also Ahmet, the childhood friend who never left and who represents everything the two brothers could have become if they had stayed. One evening, when they casually notice an overturned car on the side of a country road with two corpses and bags full of dirty money, their lives inevitably change.

The protagonists of Kasaba will find themselves grappling with a series of difficult decisions, unaware of the trouble they have gotten themselves into. On the trail of that money is not only the killer who eliminated those in the crashed car, but also a ruthless criminal gang that is ready to turn the entire community upside down to recover the stolen goods, without any moral scruples.

Kasaba: Money is Desires

This new eight-episode Turkish miniseries, which enriches Netflix's original production catalog, bears the signature of Seren Yüce, a director already known for his clinical approach to social realism with Çoğunluk - Majority (2010), his debut work with which he won the Lion of the Future for best debut at the Venice Film Festival. On this occasion, he tackles a story of opportunity, of loyalty and survival, of how easy money can turn into the worst of poisons for those desperately hungry for it and capable of transforming lambs into lions.

In Turkish sociology and literature, the provincial town has never been a place of pastoral innocence but rather a purgatory, a kind of suspended limbo between the peasant past and the industrial future of the big city, belonging completely to neither. The thick fog that surrounds these barren spaces, with the small urban agglomeration becoming a paradoxical stage for the showdown, thus becomes a metaphor for the differences between rural and metropolitan life, with the protagonists dragged into something bigger than themselves, seen before only in films and now involving them firsthand.

Until the End of the World

The screenplay tries to exploit this sociologically charged context of idiosyncrasies to build a moral drama with a neo-noir slant, questioning the fragility of bonds in the face of the god money. While the overall picture works, especially in the first part of the season, some more than evident contrivances appear, guiding the story along predetermined tracks. Just look at the conclusion of the first episode, where it is solely the stupidity of the main characters that complicates their lives and thus allows the criminal nightmare to continue.

The stash thus becomes an alien object, an embodiment of chaos in the stagnant order of family dynamics that soon expand to those of the town. The dilemma is not merely legal but existential: trapped between loyalty, a spirit of redemption, and the struggle for survival, will they listen to reason or risk everything in the hope of changing their lives forever? That seemingly easy solution, which not by chance quickly becomes entangled, is also the only way to escape lives of anonymity, a turning point in otherwise already sealed destinies.

As in other operations of this type, Kasaba also suffers from an excessive dilution of narrative dynamics, especially in the central part, which is drawn out with the inclusion of some secondary figures that perhaps could have been avoided. The action and tension then definitively erupt in the convoluted finale, where the awaited showdown arrives with less impetus than expected, as the epilogue of a series that is both imperfect and captivating.