Fractured

Of all the battlefields in the world, one of the most heated can be within the walls of a family home.Fikret Reyhan draws on this brooding and often bruising energy for this claustrophobic drama, which sees tensions mount for an extended family in Istanbul.

It's not immediately obvious why Fatih (Hakan Emre Unal) has brought his friend Ayhan (Görkem Mertsöz) and Ayhan's brother Cengiz (Süleyman Karaahmet) round for tea with his father Muhittin (Hakan Salinmis). All the rules of polite society are followed - the offering of drinks, the bringing of a gift of baklava but an unspoken pressure already exists between father and son.

As with most filial relationships, it's a tension that has been fed by many sources and across many years, in particular, feelings surrounding Fatih's stay and return from London, where he and Ayhan cemented their friendship. For all the politeness from Ayhan and Cengiz, they are men on a mission, needing to secure the return of a loan that was given to Fatih for his family to invest in minivans for a school transport business. In these early scenes, as the handheld camera moves from face to face, Reyhan gives us a taste of the uncomfortable drama to come after the two men leave and the rest of Fatih's family gather for a meal that they all know is more of a political summit.

Like the house that Muhittin has built, layer upon layer, apportioning space for his sons to live, the arguments that will flow out through the course of the evening have been being constructed and reupholstered down the years. Reyhan has a firm grip of family dynamics, indicating Muhittin's power over the household not just in the way he instructs children to be removed or his elderly mother to be fed but in the way his sons automatically move aside when he wants to sit down. The women, though in the patriarchal shadow, are not forgotten by Reyhan, who shows they have plenty of skirmishes and secrets of their own.

The writer/director also captures the way that family conversations can flow from the inconsequential to the serious without warning and how no act of weakness or failure goes unrecalled. While the openness of the ending may prove frustrating for some viewers, it is also an indication that, in many families, no conversation is ever truly over and feelings rarely fully resolved.