Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s style is best summed up by the names of his excellent last two films, Distant and Climates. Following Tarkovsky, Ceylan (with the recent help of cinematographer Gökhan Tiryaki) fixes his camera on people and objects so as to underline the inherently suspenseful qualities of looking. Gusts of wind and drops of rain become cataclysmic; figures in the background are racked into focus like ghosts; ones in the foreground are dissected like colossi, telling stories with every wrinkle, every bead of sweat.

Ceylan’s latest, Three Monkeys, pushes this suspense outward, telling a knotted tale of crime and passion characteristic of film noir: a politician involved in a hit-and-run asks his driver to take responsibility for it, offering him a sum of money that becomes their mutual undoing. It is, often, too much. Ceylan’s style is already so intellectually engrossing, so consummately constructed, that one feels overly taxed, or just distracted, by the demands of his plot. The plot itself progresses because of contrivances that Ceylan’s sophisticated, glacial tone seems to want to hide. Three Monkeys might even be primarily elusive—a strange quality for a master so well known for uncrating his characters’ desires and, in turn, the environments in which they are born.—David Balzer

Three Monkeys festival show times:
• September 5, 9:15 a.m., Scotiabank Theatre 4
• September 6, 12:45 p.m., Scotiabank Theatre 1