Grimmfest 2024 - Film Review

This astronomically violent jujutsu movie is a dark elixir of pure revenge that obliterates the boundaries of family loyalty.

Unassuming gym janitor Sayara harbours an inheritance of bleak indoctrination and martial arts mastery. When a gang of politically entitled scum rape and beat her promiscuous sister to death, she fulfils a paternal pledge of utterly merciless retribution and goes thoroughly fucking mental.

Uncompromising filmmaker Can Evrenol(Baskin) returns with a brutal genre offering that refuses to play by the rules. With Sayara, he has reconfigured fight movie mechanics to his unfussy ends, resulting in a visceral overload of raw carnage and flagrant nihilism.

The plot is deliciously simple and stark, leaving ample room for a multitude of ultra-violent sins. Bonfires bookend Sayara, and there is a neck-deep river of blood between them.

The fight scenes are grounded and grisly, showcasing jujutsu’s speed, savagery, and technical grace. Do not expect flashy Raid-like choreography and extrapolated beatdowns. However, Sayara often makes those films look like Kung Fu Panda in of outright barbarism.

Jujutsu translates as ‘yielding art’; its core principle is turning an assailant’s energy against them. This makes it the perfect combat system for Sayara to sustain plausibility as she takes on foes of superior physicality. Once her assailants fall prey to counter-attacking excellence, she unleashes the stone-cold killer within and ground-and-pound splatter works shower the screen with top-tier gore effects.

Action films can feel like watching a video game as a player progresses towards a final boss showdown. Not so this one. Our anti-heroine’s flash-fire of revenge is refreshingly non-linear and gloriously arbitrary. Every individual implicated in her sister’s murder, and those associated by proxy, absolutely must fucking die with no regard for character hierarchy or conventional genre structure.

One of the film’s most striking aspects is its twisted approximation of romance. Sayara is held prisoner by her latent sociopathy and lives in the shadows of life to protect her smouldering hostility from provocation. As such, she is reduced to fantasising about the man she desires.

How Evrenol projects and resolves this is perverse, outrageous, and bizarrely touching. This results in a final act of all-consuming vengeance that incinerates the concept of affection and exposes the ragged tatters of Sayara’s mental health.

Despite Sayara‘s extreme nature, Evrenol stamps the exploitation with his hallmarks of political cynicism, vicious feminism, grotesque humour, classy camerawork, and narrative clarity. Most action flicks are hammered together with rusty nails, but Sayara is carefully interwoven with paradoxical threads of subtlety. Indeed, considering its stripped-back nature, it remains an intensely cinematic experience.

This is partly due to a fantastic sound design that bullies the audience at every opportunity and superb performances from a cast willing to commit physically and emotionally. Mostly, though, it comes down to the director’s inherent confidence that a film should follow through on its thematic convictions, no matter how bruising the path.

Sayara is a scorched-earth action flick with degenerate horror credentials that swaggers into movie violence infamy with savage style.