The Funeral Movie Review

Written by Joel Harley

Released by Reel Suspects

Written and directed by Orcun Behram
2023, 108 minutes, Rated 18
Glasgow FrightFest premiere on 9th March 2024

Starring:
Ahmet Rifal Sungar as Cemal
Cansu Türedi as Zeynep
Emrah Altintoprak as Semih
Gizem Erdem as Ayse

Review:

It's a truth generally acknowledged in film that if you give a man a female zombie, it'll only be a matter of time before he tries to fuck falls in love with her. As axioms go, it's no Euclid, granted, but I've seen Deadgirl.

Enter lonely hearse driver Cemal (Ahmet Rifal Sungar), entrusted with driving the corpse of a young woman across the country to her parents. Hearing some surprisingly not-dead noises from within the bodybag, Cemal opens up to find Zeynep (Cansu Türedi) undead inside, groaning and glassy-eyed.

Quickly becoming entranced by the, uh, murder victim's beauty, it doesn't take long for Cemal to start falling for the zombie. However, she's woken up hungry, and Cemal isn't able to satiate her for long with his own flesh. And so, with a ravenous zombie to feed, lovelorrn Cemal sets about on a murder spree of his own...

This Turkish horror film from director Orcun Behram - titled Cenaze in its mother tongue - follows a fairly predictable trajectory at first, with Cemal developing an attachment to zombified Zeynep, and going to increasingly dark lengths to keep her fed. At almost two hours, it starts off as a bit of a miserable trudge, enlivened by strong lead performances and an ever-mounting sense of pressure. Türedi does great work as the living dead girl, slowly growing in strength, power and intelligence as the film progresses - the best film zombie performance since Day of the Dead's Bub.

The film is further set apart from its peers in budget and theme with its striking cinematography - deploying some truly unsettling imagery during its folk horror-adjacent final third. As it enters this final stretch and the story enters less familiar territory (rural and mountainous Turkey, if you want to be specific), it sheds the skin of everything it had been up until this point and transforms into a different beast entirely.

The sudden shift in tone - Let The Right One In by way of 30 Days of Night slash Kill List - may not always work, but is appreciated given that I thought that this was going to be a film about a guy repeatedly raping a dead woman (the reason I couldn't stand Deadgirl when I first encountered it in 2008).

The Funeral is a bleak and brutal gothic roadtrip, and a zombie movie only in that it happens to have a flesh-eating zombie in it.

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