Summary
10 Days of a Curious Man is indeed a curious movie – a weird genre hybrid with a creepy central romance and a slightly psychotic streak.
10 Days of a Curious Man is the third in a trilogy of Turkish movies that began with 10 Days of a Good Man in 2023 and 10 Days of a Bad Man later the same year. All three are available to stream on Netflix, which shouldn’t necessarily be taken as a recommendation. They’re very weird, and this one is no different.
I’ll confess to not exactly being up on the lore, but I recall the previous movies as being about a lawyer-turned-private-investigator in the Marlowe mold, whereas this one is about the same guy being a failed writer turned nutcase assassin. That’s the general vibe, anyway.
There are unifying qualities to all three movies. They all have needlessly complicated plots. They all straddle the lines of a few different genres, so it’s impossible to take them seriously. One scene feels like satire; the next like serious drama. And they all feature a love interest who looks so much younger than the protagonist that it makes me feel genuinely uncomfortable.
There’s no underlying theme or point that I can discern – they’re like character studies of a character who doesn’t know who he is from one movie to the next. In 10 Days of a Curious Man, Sadik (Nejat Isler) has written a novel that he can’t publish because it’s rubbish. Taking the literary criticism to heart, he gets embroiled in the disappearance of Mutena, a provocative social media dancer whose online alias is “Burn This World”. He uses the investigation, which becomes increasingly tangled and violent, to provide a more dramatic structure for his own novel.
Three movies in and we’re collecting characters and callbacks like a Marvel production. You’ll recognize Sadik’s loyal henchmen, Zeynel (Riza Kocaoglu) and Hosu (Kadir Cermik), and side characters like Gulhan (Hazal Subasi) and Meral (Senay Gurler). Pinar (Ilayda Akdogan) is the sidekick who is 26 – I googled it – but looks 18 and tries to seduce Sadik constantly. Isler is 52 and looks older. The whole thing’s a bit weird.
Needless to say, crowbarring all of these characters into a new mystery doesn’t really work, but then again the new mystery is barely holding together at the best of times. It’s such a relentless procession of he-said-she-said leads that I lost track midway through and never bothered to care. After a while, Sadik starts brandishing a silenced pistol and killing people off with very scant justification, having presumably mistook being curious for being mental.
These movies must have fans or Uluç Bayraktar wouldn’t have made three of them, but 10 Days of a Curious Man is the worst of a so-so bunch and I hope he doesn’t bother to make any more. With the streaming landscape being what it is, though, you can never quite tell.
