‘Sayara’ Review: A Brutally Beautiful Rape-Revenge Tale [HARD:LINE Film Festival 2025]
In my almost 32 years of life, I’ve never smoked a cigarette. Between growing up with smokers and throwing up after a drunken single puff in college, I figured it was in my best interest to steer clear. Until I watched Can Evrenol’s (Baskin) latest feature film, Sayara. His take on the rape-revenge narrative is brutally honest, beautifully shot, and emotionally devastating to the point that I stumbled out of the Ostentor Kino (the venue for HARD:LINE Film Festival) into the German sunlight, desperate for a cigarette in my shaking fingers.
Thankfully, a new friend spared some tobacco, and I let the smoke sting my throat as I choked back my tears, reflecting on how seen I felt in a rage-filled martial arts film. As a sexual assault survivor who’s written extensively about rape-revenge films and has even made one of those films herself, I admit I’m particularly sensitive about how male directors handle the subject of sexual assault. So often, they fall squarely into exploitation, packed full of violence in the name of shock value. But Evrenol delivers something truly special with Sayara, a mean-spirited and deeply intelligent film that ripped out my heart and cradled it gently in its capable hands.
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The titular Sayara (Duygu Kocabiyik) is a reserved Muslim woman who works as a cleaning lady at a local gym in modern-day Turkey. During the day, she mops floors and cleans locker rooms, but when no one’s around, she removes her hijab and practices the martial arts her father taught her as a kid. See, she isn’t Turkish. She, her sister Yonca (Özgül Kosar), and their mother are immigrants from Turkmenistan. While Sayara cleans floors and keeps to herself, her sister sleeps with the married gym owner Baris (Emre Kizilirmak)—both use their bodies for labor, just in very different ways.
One night, after a fight with the gym owner, Yonca is called to an apartment building. Despite Sayara begging her to stay home, Yonca heads out, unaware of the hell that awaits her in that building. Baris is the son of a Turkish politician, so he’s surrounded by yes men who deal with any problems that wander into this path. Yonca is labeled a problem, so his cronies handle her. Thankfully, Evrenol never explicitly shows the sexual and physical torture Yonca is put through. She is anything but the perfect victim, spitting blood in the face of her attackers, fighting back until the bitter end. No matter her efforts, her attackers win and take her life for ultimately being a woman unafraid to scream in the face of patriarchy.
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Thus begins Sayara’s descent into revenge-fueled madness. As soon as she learns about her sister’s death, she rips off her hijab and cuts off all her hair. She transforms herself into a dark avenging angel, ready to take her training and utilize it in the most violent ways humanly possible. The quiet, reserved woman she tried to be is thrown to the side once she finally expresses her rage, sadness, and every negative emotion she’s tried to suppress. No one is safe from her very capable and very deadly hands.
Kocabiyik is stunning as Sayara, using her face and physicality to portray her character’s devastating emotional journey. She doesn’t have a lot of dialogue and has to tell Sayara’s story silently, which is no easy task for any actor, no matter how seasoned. But Kocabiyik is green, with only a few other films under her belt. This performance alone proves her star power and ability to meld physicality with acting to create a character that you both love and despise with every terrible decision she makes on her blood-fueled saga.
That brutality lends itself to the film’s grey morality. Evrenol doesn’t want to make a film about good versus evil; he wants to play with the viewer’s morality and challenge their expectations of what a film’s “hero” is supposed to be. That may alienate some viewers because Sayara’s actions are extreme. But within the world of this film, within the context of who Sayara is and her upbringing, it feels right. The men of the film commit acts of violence that are extreme reactions to female rage. So why not let Sayara unleash her unbridled rage on everyone who represents the toxicity of patriarchy, both in Turkey and in the world at large?
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With Sayara, Evrenol is crafting both a deeply Turkish film and a very universal one. While there are moments where I wanted more focus on Sayara herself than on the anxiety-riddled men who want to cover their tracks, I understand why Evrenol forces us to spend time with these criminals and misogynists. To understand how disgusting they are in their everyday attitudes, Evrenol needs to dedicate space to their behavior to establish just how deep this corruption goes. Thankfully, there’s never any empathy given to these men, but rather an insight into their ultimate cowardice.
Evrenol takes the grindhouse sensibility and updates it for 2025, never skimping on the brutality but always ensuring that we deeply feel every emotional beat of Sayara. The result is a heart-breaking, blood-filled descent into hell that’ll have you gasping for air during the final act. It’s truly something special, something that’ll wreck you emotionally, and yet you’ll say, “Thank you, Can Evrenol, may I please have some more?”
Summary
Sayara is a heart-breaking, blood-filled descent into hell that’ll have you gasping for air during the final act.
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