Dir: Ferit Karahan | Drama 2026
Ferit Karahan’s Djinn Wedding, making its world premiere at TIFF, is a deliciously strange, atmospheric family drama that turns a wedding celebration into something altogether darker and more unsettling.
Four estranged siblings return to their remote Anatolian village for their sister’s wedding, but beneath the rituals, feasting and forced togetherness lie years of resentment, secrets and unresolved grief. Karahan keeps shifting the ground beneath his characters, moving between generations and time periods until past and present begin to feel almost eerily interchangeable.
There’s a wonderfully unpredictable quality to the film — funny one moment, ominous the next — and a strong sense of place that makes the village feel both intensely real and faintly haunted. The wedding becomes a pressure cooker, exposing the fault lines within a family while opening the door to questions of belief, memory and inherited trauma.
At 132 minutes, it occasionally feels overstuffed, but its ambition and sheer atmospheric confidence are hard to resist. Djinn Wedding is an intriguing, unsettling TIFF discovery: a film with enough mystery, bite and visual flair to generate plenty of conversation beyond its world premiere.
TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL