Mustang's reviews
Media reviews
The Washington Post
For all of the outrage that Mustang inspires by its depiction of sexist oppression, it?s still enormously pleasurable to watch, in part because of its enchanting setting (it was filmed in the northern Turkish town of Inebolu) and Warren Ellis?s thoughtful score, but mostly because of Sensoy and her four equally beguiling co-stars.
Los Angeles Times
It's a moving portrait of sisterhood, a celebration of a fierce femininity and a damning indictment of patriarchal systems that seek to destroy and control this spirit.
New York Times
Confined to their grandmother?s house, the girls bridle against losing their freedoms in a story grounded in both laughter and tears, and above all in the resilient strength of these girls against soul-deadening strictures.
Fotogramas
The filmmaker composes her images, imbued with an exquisite evanescent poetry.
Entertainment Weekly
It?s not hard to see why Mustang has been dubbed the ?Turkish Virgin Suicides.? Like Sofia Coppola?s dreamy, unsettling 1999 debut, it?s another first film by a young female director that focuses in feverish close-up on the adolescent awakening of five restless, radiant sisters ? and the ruin that follows when their family tries to contain it.
The New Yorker
Mustang is the début feature of Deniz Gamze Ergüven, and it?s quite something: a coming-of-age fable mapped onto a prison break, at once dream-hazed and sharp-edged with suspense.
The Wrap
Ergüven and her similarly green cast prove to be preternatural talents in delivering a story that?s simultaneously alarming and loads of tart-tongued fun.
Clarin
The film reflects the particular expertise geopolitical and cultural situation of a country that is a kind of border between West and East, between Europe and Asia.
The A.V. Club
The result, while less poetic and artful than Eugenides? book or Coppola?s film, is much more emotionally direct, and pulls off a very tricky balancing act between bemoaning its characters? fate and celebrating their resilience.
Cinemanía
We must thank Ergüven, debutante that comes with the lesson well learned, besides just aesthetic sense and narrative ability, her amazing nose for casting.
El Mundo
Interludes with bodies lying in the hot sun, silence and desire dazzle.
The Hollywood Reporter
What makes the transfixing film so effective is that the director refuses to portray them simplistically, as misunderstood angels, and she has enough trust in her audience to leave the drama's implicit feminism unstated.
The Guardian
While the subject matter is enraging, the film is not without warmth and occasional levity.
ABC
The importance of "Mustang" is to reveal deep and sickly drama without sacrificing the shades of comedy and a whiteness and narrative full of warmth stupor the screen.
Variety
Though set in Turkey, shot in Turkish, and telling a Turkish story about the demonization of female sexuality, Deniz Gamze Erguven?s beautifully mounted debut, ?Mustang,? has an unmistakable West European sensibility.
Cahiers du Cinéma
Starlets give the film an energy that goes beyond the format.