by Nataliia Serebriakova
Worth: $14.40
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
San Sebastian International Film Festival
Cast:
Mariam Dawoud, Eren M. Güvercin, David Schütter, Anna Bederke, Mohamed Achour
Intro:
Its melancholy is gentle, its romance easy to follow, and its emotional demands modest ...
Fatih Akin’s Ghost Song begins in a cemetery, where a Turkish family gathers around the grave of a husband and father. Among the four daughters, Farasha lingers for a moment longer than the others. It is a small gesture, but one that acquires an unsettling significance in retrospect. Before long, death will become the starting point of a love story that its protagonists never had the chance to experience in the ordinary course of their lives.
At a party in a bar high above Hamburg, Farasha meets Faris, a young man who, like her, has Turkish roots. Their encounter seems to promise the familiar beginnings of a teenage romance. Later, Farasha joins Faris and their friends for a drive through the city at night. The car ends up in the river. While the others survive, Farasha dies. But rather than bringing their story to an end, her death opens a passage into another world: she begins appearing in Faris’s dreams, where the relationship that barely had time to begin in reality can finally unfold.
For forty nights, the two explore the possibilities of a love suspended between life and death. They wander through Hamburg’s streets, embrace and dream of a shared future. Their encounters have the tenderness and awkwardness of a first romance, with all the things young people imagine doing together but rarely know how to put into words. Yet each dream must end. Farasha eventually leaves Faris, departing by different modes of transport — a bus, a train or a boat — as if she were always travelling towards a destination he cannot follow.
The idea behind Ghost Song reportedly originated with Akin’s young son, who once wondered what it would be like if a friend were a ghost. It is a deceptively simple premise, and Akin approaches it without excessive metaphysical complications. The film is less interested in explaining the mechanics of its supernatural world than in exploring what happens when two people are given an impossible opportunity to fall in love.
Akin has always been an uneven filmmaker, capable of moving between accessible mainstream drama and uncompromisingly dark explorations of human behaviour. In the Fade, his 2017 drama starring Diane Kruger, transformed a story of personal loss into a forceful examination of grief, racism and the pursuit of justice. The Golden Glove, by contrast, descended into the sordid world of a Hamburg serial killer with almost confrontational brutality. Ghost Song belongs to a different register altogether: a romantic fantasy that favours melancholy and emotional directness over psychological darkness.
Hamburg, the city where Akin was born and has spent much of his life, once again becomes more than a backdrop. Its streets, nightlife and waterways form the geography of a romance that can exist only in dreams. The city feels recognisable and tangible, yet the film gradually transforms it into a place where ordinary spatial boundaries lose their meaning. The night becomes an emotional landscape, allowing the lovers to inhabit the life that death has denied them.
The cinematography by Frank Griebe is central to this effect. Akin and Griebe shape the city into a dreamlike environment in which darkness, artificial light and familiar urban spaces acquire an almost otherworldly quality. The visual approach supports the film’s movement between the physical and the imagined without insisting on a sharp distinction between the two. Instead, the dream sequences feel like extensions of the characters’ emotional reality. Malakoff Kowalski’s music and the recurring Turkish song that gives the film its English-language title deepen this atmosphere, turning music into a thread connecting memory.
Mariam Dawoud and Eren M. Güvercin bring an appealing restraint to their performances as Farasha and Faris. Güvercin, in particular, has the kind of psychophysical presence that recalls Timothée Chalamet: a slender, slightly melancholic figure whose emotional intensity seems to exist beneath the surface rather than spill into overt displays of feeling.
As in much of Akin’s cinema, the story also touches on the lives of Hamburg’s Turkish community. However, some of these elements feel less organically integrated into the film’s central concerns. An episode involving Farasha’s family stealing apples from a city garden and being pursued by German police dogs introduces social commentary that feels awkwardly emphatic.
Ultimately, Ghost Song is an agreeable but decidedly minor addition to Akin’s filmography. The result is pleasant enough, but hardly revelatory. Still, there are worse ways to spend an evening: as a film for a first date, Ghost Song might do just fine. Its melancholy is gentle, its romance easy to follow, and its emotional demands modest — leaving plenty of room for critical conversation once the credits roll.
