We discuss the ending of the Netflix film Cici (2022), which will contain spoilers.
Cici is a Netflix drama from Turkey. Written and directed by Berkun Oya, the film explores the lives of a family across two timelines.
Synopsis from my review:
The first act of the movie is set in the 1970s on a Turkish farm where patriarch Bekir runs his family with an iron fist. His wife, Havva, hates him for cheating on her with the ladies of the night and for the way he treats his children. Slapping his oldest son, Kadir is a regular occurrence. He refuses to let the kids go to school and his daughter, Saliha, sneaks out for romantic evenings with a boy working on the farm, Cemil. Yusuf is the youngest son and Bekir’s pride and joy. One day, after enacting a particularly cruel punishment on Kadir, the patriarch falls ill and the family is forced to relocate.
Decades after Bekir’s death, Kadir is now a filmmaker who is shooting a movie about his experiences as a boy at the old farm. But after struggling to complete the film, the now-middle-aged man moved back into his childhood home. Because of Covid, the whole family finds themselves living under the same roof again. Havva, now an old lady with dementia, has been discharged from her nursing home to the care of her daughter because of the pandemic. Saliha is divorced and has a teen daughter, Naz. The youngest child, Yusuf, is now married with one child but seems unhappy with his life.
Cici ending explained – what really happened to Bekir?
While Kadir was shooting his film at the old farmhouse, Havva was already showing the first signs of mental decline. However, during a sweet moment with her daughter and granddaughter, the old woman makes a stunning confession on tape that Naz seems to have forgotten. But being back at the farmhouse leads the young woman to suddenly remember what her grandmother had said.
Desperate to confirm, Naz finds the old tape and plays it. Saliha, Yusuf and Kadir walk in on her. The siblings are initially touched to watch a video of her mom while she still had her mental faculties. But what she says on the tapes stuns them all.
The ending of Cici reveals that the night Bekir got sick after punishing Kadir with the hosepipe, Havva had crushed some sleeping pills in his tea. She then opened the window and put out the fire, seemingly intending to get her husband sick. While she couldn’t have known he would end up dying, she did maliciously intend for him to spend the night in the cold and fall ill. Of course, Yusuf and Saliha are absolutely devastated. Kadir, on the other hand, is not surprised. He had seen the tape before, and it’s implied that’s a secret he’d spent years keeping from his siblings.
The reveal also puts the scene with Havva crying at her husband’s side as he lay dying in perspective. Those weren’t tears of grief, but tears of guilt. Did the old woman regret murdering her husband? Her dementia means her three children will never get a straight answer. But the way she tells herself off before smiling at the camera in the final scene suggests she likey had no regrets.
What did you think of the ending of the Netflix film Cici? Comment below.
