“I told you that we should have turned digitally!” With this shock sigh, the film producer Lilith (Nicolette Krebitz) comments on the disappearance of an ominous stack with 16mm film material from a cabinet in her own apartment. Her director and partner Yiğit (Serkan Kaya), however, is an artist and turns analogously, even if he is more by chance into the great conflict that the material is cheering on on said film roles. Because Yiğit makes a film about the arson attack on a Solingen asylum seeker home, in which five people died in 1993. A “important” topic, a political film- but also one in which, as so often in the German theme and history film, general unity is cheap again. At least that's how Yiğit has to be thrown as a reproach – and that the choice of his artistic means then triggers an ever more escalating controversy, results in Mehmet Akif Büyükatalays “Hysteria” Rather simply than that it would be large by Yiğit.
The conflict takes its outcome when some extras were cast from the local asylum seekers' home in the ashes of the penny-burned film set to discover the remains of a Koran. And this is how the debate starts: Burning a Koran, isn't it just neo -Nazis? And if you want to recreate this act for a film shoot, can you use a “real” Koran? Or would you have had to fall back on a “fake coran”? The emotions cook up, with the believing driver Majid (Nazmi Kırık) as well as in the secular, but also injured theater director Mustafa (Aziz çapkurt) in his cultural roots. Yiğit and Lilith now have to ask themselves how to deal with the actually unplanned provocation. Do you cut the scene out so that you just don't hurt religious feelings, not even unwanted? Or shouldn't you even gratefully accept the controversy? Then the rather adapted Yiğit could finally stylize himself as a pioneer for freedom of art!
With the losing of a key, intern Elif (Devrim Lingnau) triggers an ever-swinging paranoia strudel.
Between all of these pages, the young director Elif (Devrim Lingnau), who opens the door with a mishap for a all-round deception and confusion- even literally even by losing Lilith's apartment key. In the desperate attempt to cover up her mistake, she also reveals the associated address to a supposed finder – an invitation to the nightly slump. But then only the controversial film material has disappeared – but who made it disappear from what motives? Who benefits the most from it, and who is the easiest way to push the thief into your shoes?
When you read what “Hysteria” is about, a lot sounds like this after such a classic German themed and dialogue film- after one of those films that the director and author Büyükatalay also makes a bit fun. Because such a film can be felt quite well when watching watches, he didn't want to do it. But what kind of film is “Hysteria” instead – and he really does it work completely to clear up from these bonds and falls of the German problem film?
The voltage does not go through completely
Formally, Büyükatalay definitely reaches over long distances into completely different registers-from the disturbing re-enactment of the burning apartment of Solingen in the first settings, which does not immediately reveal its character as a film-in-film metakino, over the thriller and paranoiacino -elements that shape the atmosphere of the film over long distances. A little Brian de Palma may be in there, and even more Roman Polanski in the days of “Der Ghostwriter”. But “Hysteria” does not work completely in this – in order to really go through as a tension cinema, then everything remains too discourse, and somehow also to meta.
What Büyükatalay brings on the screen with his second directorial work is a kind of hybrid. Discourse cinema and paranoia thriller, black comedy and film operating sanctuary often devour in each other indispensably, contrast each other in productive or at least enjoyable ways, and strangers elsewhere, as they came from completely different films that never really come together.
A lack of ambitions are definitely not the problem
All of this certainly has an artistic method – and also a very, very thick book by Michael Haneke (of which you have to think again and again here), which is used as a door stopper in “Hysteria”, is not at all randomly put into the picture. Not everything should arise in this film, and not every puzzle should be clarified without any doubt when the final escalation has been reached and the (perhaps a little too transparent) final image offers a circular closure between the beginning and end.
The fact that one or the other irritation remains at the end of “Hysteria” is certainly not unintentional – and the impression that a wide variety of cinematic grammars are sometimes somewhat unsound here does not have to mean anything negative. The overall impression remains somewhat ambivalent, because not every stylistic or discursive frictional area looks really productive. The fact that this is a highly ambitious film is not to be dismissed, and even in the moments when “Hysteria” does not work, he does not fail because he would not do enough or trust.
Conclusion: a little bit of discourse cinema, a bit of black-humorous film operating satire, and a lot of cinematic strategies from the tension and paranoiacino: Not everything that director Mehmet Akif Büyükatalay throws into a pot for “Hysteria” also works really well. An ambitious and quite idiosyncratic film comes out anyway.
We saw “Hysteria” as part of the Berlinale 2025, where it was shown in the Panorama section.