Winter Sleep

There are films that try to evoke a world and its characters, and then there are those that seem to jettison us into an alternate dimension whose people and places have been existing for years—we’ve just finally been granted access. Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Palme d’Or-winning Winter Sleep is one of the latter. With a knotty, multilayered storyline revealed in subtle increments, a feverish devotion to plumbing its characters’ psyches, and (it bears mentioning) its 196-minute running time, Winter Sleep finds its Turkish director at the peak of his powers, aesthetically and philosophically. Like much of Ceylan’s work, Winter Sleep intimately plumbs its characters and their relationships, yet strives to expose them only through suggestion and obfuscation. At the same time, there are elements in Winter Sleep that seem like striking departures from Ceylan’s style—most notably its reliance on precisely scripted dialogue, often conveyed through marathon conversations that help explain the film’s hefty yet transfixing length.

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