SEEfest 2021 Review: Erdem Tepegöz’s In the Shadows is a horror film for today’s Amazon-addled world
Numan Acar is one of those actors you’ve probably seen many times, but never quite registered. The Turkish-born German actor has a career that reads on paper like the absolute stereotype of what an actor of Middle-Eastern descent has to take: lots of terrorists, thugs, and Arabian Nights. For Erdem Tepegöz’s In the Shadows, which recently screened at the South East European Film Festival (SEEfest), however, he adopts a new type: the leading man in a totalitarian dystopia, who’s the first to realize something’s not right. Whoever’s in charge of this mysterious world probably would still view him as a terrorist, but to everyone else, he’s the heroic everyman we wish we could be. And he definitely has the best hair.
Acar’s Zait works in a rotten, decaying factory over a rotten, decaying mine. It’s surrounded by trees and hills, and connected to the outside world with cables, which periodically bring a dangerously rickety cable car full of fresh-faced young employees. Lunch is two kinds of white paste and an apple; a weekly provision allotment offers the bare minimum of extras for survival. Any injuries must be kept secret, lest one be removed from work as a result. And we’re never told what that removal entails: might be death, might just be elimination of income. Either way, it’s considered the absolute most undesirable outcome.
Aside from the workers, the only other apparent resident of the facility is a cantankerous repairman (Vedat Erincin) with Einstein hair. He’s the kind of repairman who insists (1) The thing isn’t really broken, (2) If it is broken, it’s because you’re doing it wrong, (3) If it’s legitimately broken through nobody’s fault, you owe him big-time for the massive inconvenience of making him do his job. Anyone who has ever been at a workplace with an in-house repairman on call knows the type.
The only part of the factory that always works? The ubiquitous cameras, everywhere. Who knows if any humans are monitoring, or just some unseen algorithm. Food and amenities are dispensed through wall slots, and deprived if someone needs disciplining; alarms go off if a camera gets covered up. But nobody who runs the factory is ever seen.
As rusted and busted as everything is, Zait’s part of the routine like everyone else, until he hears distant voices through the pipes in his bunk room at night. Investigating the source, he gets sprayed with a black liquid, and from there on out, develops a skin condition which steadily worsens. As the only solution to illness is removal from the job, he can’t admit to it. But maybe, just maybe, he can find the real cause.
The most obvious interpretation of writer-director Erdem Tepegoz’s film is that it’s allegorical communism. Factories, labor, generic outfits, total disrepair, and so forth. Still, in the era of Amazon, is it all that different from capitalism? As seen in Nomadland, Amazon would probably claim they offer “freedom”…freedom, that is, to live in a van and be seasonally employed. But In the Shadows‘ factory offers room, board, and guaranteed work. Neither is big on healthcare. All workers are replaceable. And constantly monitored. The warehouse Cold War counts no real winners among the employed.
Tepegoz’s dystopia is not unlike the kind found in Eraserhead, Saw movies, or Metallica’s “Unforgiven” video. The defining trait of most such hellscapes is to force the protagonist to decide whether merely surviving in such a world is worth it. What would give life here meaning? And if the answer isn’t “work,” how do you expect to find it? These, incidentally, are valid questions in real life when the going gets tough as well. It could as easily be a metaphor for depression as it is the indictment of an economic system.
Except that, at the very end – and this really isn’t a spoiler – Tepegoz flat-out makes the movie’s point irrefutably explicit. It’s an overly on-the-nose note to end with, and odds are you’ll be one step ahead of the point. For the sake of viewers who aren’t, fine. The rest of the movie remains an immersive nightmare in the best way, because even if the rust and corrosion are over the top, the very real corrosive nature of the situation isn’t. You might not be Zait, but you could become him.
As horror cinema’s most famous resident of run-down industrial warehouses might say, “Live or die…make your choice.” Jigsaw’s deathtraps move faster, but the one so slow you don’t realize it’s killing you is much more insidious.
