This oddity from  Kosmos director Reha Erdem will try the patience of some. Others might wanna stick around to see which, if any, of its low-key mysteries are resolved—especially if they have a slightly bent sense of humour.

While everyone else is evacuated, a small group of people refuse to leave a (very lovely) island threatened by an earthquake. Among them is Mesut, the assholish father to lazy nogoodnik, Adem, whose apparently fatal illness looks like another ploy to have everybody else take care of him. Adem’s exasperated wife also turns up and becomes cut off from the mainland.

Meanwhile, Mesut’s friend, an elderly doctor, begs for the hand of a young stray, Meryam, although her motives—given the presence on the island of her skulking ex—are every bit as opaque as Adem’s. The one binding influence on all of them is Mesut’s faithful housekeeper, Esme, whose maternal abundance seems to have a slightly mystical aspect.

These people are stuck together in a faintly Buñuelian, No Exit scenario—maybe with a touch of Wim Wenders and J.G. Ballard—surrounded by diseased horses, falling trees, and a handful of minor characters that are no more readable than anybody else. Stirringly inappropriate music (some of it by Arvo Pärt) underlines the film’s basically obfuscating tones.

I found it all amusing and occasionally cruel enough to give Singing Women a lazy thumbs up, but then again, I loved The Brown Bunny, among other fuck-you cinematic endurance tests. The comparison ends there, incidentally.

Singing Women screens at the Vancity Theatre, on Saturday (January 24) as part of the Vancouver Turkish Film Festival 2015.