Baskin 2016

A tense, nocturnal prologue opens with a young boy waking to unsettling sounds emanating from his mother’s bedroom. The scene is punctuated by a television screen that flickers with static, and a sudden, frightening vision that disrupts his sleep. He screams and pounds on his locked mother’s door as a dark, intangible hand seems to reach out from the shadows, leaving him trembling and alone in the dark.

The narrative then shifts to a small restaurant where a hooded figure arrives bearing a bucket of raw meat. Five police officers—Remzi, Arda, Yavuz, Apo, and Seyfi—sit together, their conversation taking a charged turn toward themes of sex. The mood is uneasy, a mix of casual banter and underlying tension. Seyfi, feeling unwell, hurries to the restroom and notices a frog perched on the soap stand, a small, disturbing detail that threads through the creeping sense of unease. A confrontation erupts when Yavuz clashes with the restaurant owner’s son, prompting the group to leave, though Seyfi insists on remaining behind the wheel despite his sickness.

On the road, a dispatcher calls in for back-up from colleagues who have already traveled to Inceagac, a town whispered about for its strange rumors. A chilling vision grips Seyfi—a bloody figure emerges in his mind—causing him to lose control and drive their van off the road and into a lake. Stranded and scrambling for safety, the men press on to Inceagac, where locals offer warnings about danger and deceit lurking in the fog-shrouded streets. Their destination becomes an abandoned Ottoman-era police station, the very place connected to the distress call they received.

Inside the decaying building, they discover a fellow officer in a wildly catatonic state. Seyfi stays with the incapacitated man while the remaining four search ahead. In a hidden room, he stumbles upon a circle of cultists smeared with blood and viscera. Paralyzed with fear, he is overwhelmed as the cultists surge toward him, dragging him deeper into their violent ritual.

As the group navigates the labyrinth-like interior, they are subjected to a cascade of horrifying sights and increasingly surreal experiences. Through a collage of flashbacks and dreamlike sequences, the story gradually reveals that Remzi has acted as a father figure to Arda, who was the young boy from the opening scene. The emotional weight of this past connection deepens the sense of betrayal and vulnerability that threads through the present danger.

The men, now separated and perilously close to capture, find themselves bound in a dungeon encircled by the cultists. A hooded figure—the Father—emerges and orchestrates a brutal purge: the deaths of Apo, Yavuz, and Remzi. In a chilling moment of philosophy, the Father declares that hell is not a distant place but something one carries within. The line is underscored by a dying Remzi, who passes a key to Arda just before death, a tangible tool that becomes the last spark of resistance.

With the key in hand, Arda fights back, overpowering the Father and seizing the moment to escape the crumbling structure. He bolts from the village, sprinting along a desolate road with a sense of grim triumph, only to flag down an oncoming vehicle that fails to notice him. The car turns out to be the same police van that carried them through the earlier confrontation, and in a cruel echo of the earlier vision, Arda is struck by the vehicle. The scene folds back to the familiar lake where the group’s expedition began, and the five men crash once more into the water, their fates seemingly sealed in a loop of horror and revelation.