Welcome to 25 for 25 my project to watch and eat my way around the world in 2025 with 25 movies from 25 countries matched with 25 country themed dinners. Today’s entry is Turkey but you can see the full Masterlist to watch and cook along with me.
Country: Turkey
Movie: Ölümlü Dünya [Mortal World]
Director: Ali Atay
Year: 2018
The Elevator Pitch: The Mermer family runs a restaurant but their secret double life as hit men is about to explode.
How Was the Movie?: This movie was an absolute delight! This is a full on comedy movie so the plot is actually paper thin and there’s quite a lot more ad-libbing than you’d expect but it got a lot of big laughs out of us. It’s a certain kind of comedy where there is a lot of swearing, a lot of nonsense, and a lot of violence but it was shot extremely energetically and the actors (who are I believe all professional comedians) are all doing extremely different type of comedy which gives the film an extra layer of interest. My husband and I have actually been quoting this movie for the past few weeks because it was very funny. I wanted to write a better elevator pitch for it because there’s so many weird surprises.
The only downsides of the movie are that the young woman isn’t a comedian and she constantly breaks character to laugh and it is a little distracting. There’s so many goofy fight/gun scenes in this film for no reason so you have to just be willing to go along with the ride. There is also inexplicably a sequel to this which I have to imagine is terrible.
Also the least believable part of this movie is that these men are even vaguely related to each other but over time I found that absurdity actually added to the comedy.
What was for Dinner?:
We have a couple of Turkish take out places here so I happily took advantage of that. First up is pide which was pretty good. The side with the cheese/spicy tomato mixture was just okay but with the smoked chicken it was absolutely fantastic. Also it was gigantic! It does kind of land in the area between khachapuri and pizza but that’s a great place to land. Next up was lahmacun, this one came with lots of fresh herbs and a lemon to put on top too which made it even better. Last was soslu patlıcan a kind of roasted vegetable dish that was super good on bread. It was a little sour and had a little of that smokey char taste to the vegetables making it really unique and delicious. We also got ayran the famous salted yogurt drink that is enjoyed across Turkey but sadly neither of us was huge fans of it. It is both extremely salty and also too thick for me to enjoy as a drink but too thin to dip anything into substantially but the real problem is how salty it is because that apparently immediately made me want to stop drinking it.
Obviously I also had to order some dessert. I got a mixed selection of lokum [also known as Turkish delight] which ranged from really good to just okay. Absolutely no idea what flavor any of these were but they were fresh because they had that extremely slippy, almost squeaky texture that fresh lokum has. If you’ve never had fresh lokum it’s completely different to the weird stale stuff you get in boxes in the US and it has a much softer texture and generally a strong flavor but is not too sweet. Half of these were rolled in coconut also which was a pretty interesting flavor pop. I also bought some churchkhela even though it’s more Georgian because my husband loves it. Churchkhela is made from grape must (the leftover byproduct of skin and seeds from making wine) and nuts. My husband loves this stuff it’s kind of like round fruit leather, I’m agnostic about it.
Sorry about the picture but the title screen was nearly a 10 full minutes into the movie and we had to scramble to take a picture XD
That’s it for Turkey, see you next in Armenia!