In Djinn Wedding, directed by Ferit Karahan, siblings Deniz (İlhan Şen), Ceren (Demit Özdemir), Halit (Kaan Yildirim) and Yasin (Sarp Bozkurt) face various trials after the family moves into a ‘cursed’ house in their childhood. Weaving through different time periods, the film takes us through the loss of their mother, familial responsibilities, a marriage of seeming convenience, and times of depression in a series of events that do not let up.
At Ceren’s wedding, when the whole family is back together, at a time that can finally turn their fate around, secrets come to light that ruin the family’s shot at a second chance. Karahan explores these misfortunes through an almost supernatural lens, invoking images and motifs that allude to the curse perpetually hanging over them.
Though the film has a mystical quality, Djinn Wedding deals with very grounded familial themes; the silent weight of keeping a family together, the pressures from society to exist a certain way, and the heartbreak that comes from realising you can’t do both. The film prefers subtlety over blatancy, leaving the viewer to infer how certain secrets came to be instead of spelling them out.
Djinn Wedding’s focus on the different time periods calls to mind the idea of generational curses, the decisions we make that cause them to move from one generation to the next, and the systems in place that make them hard to break.
Djinn Wedding is playing at TIFF ’26. For more information, click here.
