A Turkish dystopia that eludes western censors: Netflix’s Hot Skull reviewed

A strange new virus has infected half the world but the cure is worse than the disease: authoritarian tyranny, in which the populace lose most of their freedoms, are subject to endless testing and are corralled into gated communities.

I’m talking, of course, about the wildly implausible plot of a dystopian sci-fi thriller called Hot Skull. On the downside, it’s a bit depressing, with relentlessly grey cityscapes so bleak it makes Blade Runner look like Pleasantville. On the upside, it’s Turkish which means that – as with the brilliant Russian post-apocalyptic drama To the Lake – you get a completely different, original and perhaps more honest satirical slant on the crazy world we’re living in. Foreign-language drama, in my view, seems to elude the censors in the way English-speaking drama generally doesn’t. It also seems less formulaic.

For example, the hero is dishevelled, bookish and middle-aged. ‘The only very disturbing fact is that the main role is made by a man more than 45 years old…’ whines some ageist stripling on the Rotten Tomatoes review website. Excuse me? Let’s hear it for the older guy, I say. When it comes to saving the world, age and guile are a far more reliable bet than youth and inexperience.

His name is Murat Siyavus (Osman Sonant) and though he lives with his mum in a grubby apartment block, he’s no tragic incel but a (reluctant-ish) man of action with a special gift: unlike everyone else he appears to have immunity to this nasty bug that’s going round.

The bug is weird and oddly terrifying. It’s known as ‘Jabber’, so called because its first symptom is that the victim starts talking gibberish. There’s a chilling scene near the beginning where Murat has gone into a typical Turkish grocery store to buy some soap.