Critics reviews

In the midst of last year's ongoing #OscarsSoWhite debacle, the debut feature from Turkish director Deniz Gamze Ergüven, unfortunately flew under the radar but undoubtedly was one of the most powerful films competing at the 88th Academy Awards. Set against a backdrop of a coastal Turkish village, five orphaned sisters cared for by their grandmother and uncle resist pressures of marriage and appropriate femininity in a stunning coming of age tale.

There are direct references to Don Siegel's [Escape from Alcatraz]... But the influence is deeper than mere allusion. Mustang emulates Siegel's miraculous style in Alcatraz, a style that overlays a kind of subjective, free indirect discourse cleaving to the main character, onto the "objective" system of rigid surveillance and physical confinement that blocks every move. In other words, Ergüven's approach embodies in the film the dialectic between Lale's free spirit and her restricted body.

With its rooted sense of place and community, and rebellious spirit, this is an accomplished and engaging debut. Writer-director Deniz Gamze Ergüven and her co-writer, Alice Winocour, approach the material with a light touch – the most shocking scenes always take place off-camera – and enough humour to deflate the anger that builds on the girls' behalf.

The script is a masterclass in lean storytelling. Sorrow is expressed sparingly, and often dashed with a stoic sense of humour.

The film, with its one-dimensional figures of conservative authority, is too narrowly Manichean to allow the troubling ambivalence of multiple perspectives, but at the same time it manages to seem curiously tentative. Part of the problem is that Ergüven pictures liberty more vividly than she does captivity; there is no choking claustrophobia to lend the film an edge of genuine, cornered-animal desperation.

Its demonic energy and radiance: This is what Mustang will be remembered for in the future. All of the big political generalizations people tend to make in relation to this film are clouded by the way Ergüven locks up her wild characters inside the film frame. As the level of their confinement increases, the girls' struggles for liberation seem all the more touching.

One glorious sequence shows the sisters sneaking out and hitching a ride to a soccer game open only to female spectators. The girls make the most of this accepted form of expression, and their unbridled joy, stomping in unison with the crowd, a confetti of lights raining down rivals the exuberance of Xavier Dolan's aspect-ratio-expansion in Mommy and Céline Sciamma's lip-synching scene Girlhood. No joy in Mustang comes without a price, though, and the scene grips your heart tight.

...It's rare to find a film willing to address these subjects as they pertain to women of these ages. Ergüven's change of tone from light-hearted sisterly moments to the morose is impressive given some of the heavier subject material covered in the film's second half. Reminiscent of Sofia Coppola's THE VIRGIN SUICIDES, MUSTANG is a bold directorial feature debut on the transition from adolescence to womanhood.

Ergüven and cowriter Alice Winocour have a keen understanding of teenage impetuosity and adult cruelty, visually and audibly assisted by David Chizallet's fluid rack-focus cinematography and Warren Ellis's sensuous score.

Mustang is a sweet and soulful story of five Turkish sisters and their rebellion against the conservative society. The director, Deniz Gamze Erguven, is a Paris-based Turk, who's influenced by both Sofia Coppola's girls-on-pillow aesthetics as much as by Jane Austen.

Mustang is depressing, often extremely funny (Lale screaming at a gossipy judgmental neighbor in her traditional head-scarf: "Hey you, with the shit-brown clothes, who do you think you are? You are SHIT!") with moments of sheer triumph (the soccer game breakout) and moments of complete despair... An incredible debut. I was a wreck when I left the theatre.

Effortlessly energetic and melancholy in equal measure.