Starring Hatice Aslan and Yavuz Bingol. In Turkish with English subtitles. Unrated. Plays Friday to Thursday, September 4 to 10, at the Vancity Theatre

Nominally, this very noir film—albeit one in which all crimes take place off-screen—concerns a fidgety, self-serving politician (Ercan Kesal) who pays his chauffeur (Yavuz Bingol) to take the rap for a hit-and-run he commits just before a major election. The servant’s shiftless, college-age son (Rifat Sungar) sees dollar signs in this arrangement, and the kid’s bored, youngish mom (soulful Hatice Aslan) drifts into an affair with the feckless pol.

The beautifully shot Three Monkeys was written by director Nuri Bilge Ceylan with his wife, Ebru Ceylan (they starred together in his last film, Climates), and Kesal, and they seem to be commenting on a crisis in Turkey, and elsewhere, of top-down corruption. The monkeys involved here do all they can to avoid facing up to evil while doing little to actually stop it.

It’s obvious stuff, but what keeps it from being complete bilge is Ceylan’s unerring eye for dark mood and monochromatic detail. Despite the generally glacial pace, he keeps things from getting too sleepy through clever disorientation techniques, such as having the sound from a subsequent scene seep into the previous one. This strategy can be self-defeating, however, when a car driver manages to speak without moving his lips.

Such formal conceits (and errors) mask the thin construction of characters, and the lack of emotional resonance throughout is papered over by themes that interest Ceylan. But the vacuity of modern urban life was already a tired subject by the time Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini wrung the art and humour out of existential angst in the 1960s. In the end, providing moral clarity for people who don’t even attempt to communicate is definitely less fun than a barrel of you-know-whats.