Critics reviews

A nervy, unsettling, sometimes bleak drama of two outsiders (vividly played, with unwavering intensity and conviction, by Unel and Kekilli), Head-On in fact continues a vital strand of provocative, post-punk creativity in contemporary European cinema – a vitality from which even Akin's subsequent films (Crossing the Bridge [2005], The Edge of Heaven [2007] and the awful Soul Kitchen [2009]) have shied away.

There is an addictive quality to Akin’s bizarre but heartrending film: One may cringe every time Sibel giddily picks up a new stranger at a bar while Cahit watches on, brooding and bloodshot, but always there is the hope that they’ll change course. They do, in fact, several times over: Head-On is a movie of violent character transformations, although rarely are Cahit and Sibel operating at the same speed. The scenes in which they match up are brief but breathtaking...

Cahit (Birol Unel) and Sibel (Sibel Kekilli) are played with a deadpan self-destructiveness that sometimes tilts toward comedy, sometimes toward tragedy, sometimes simply toward grossing us out. (...) "Head-On" not only includes a car crash, but has the fascination of one. It is possible that no good can come to these characters, no matter what changes they make or what they can do for one another. Their marriage functions primarily to yank both parties out of their personal spirals of self-destruction and allow them to join in a double helix of personal misfortune.

As you reach the tacit close of this often clamorous film, you can hardly believe what a distance it seems to have travelled. Not just geographically, from graying northern suburbs to the banks of the Bosporus, but from the infernally punishing to a stunned and bewildered peace.

...Head-On belongs to the burgeoning cinema of exile, stories of economic migrants clinging to old ways in new countries and raising rootless, rebellious children. (...) The film's strength resides in the way the director, helped by his leading actors, avoids both melodrama and a schematic documentary approach to the plight of exiles.

...Fatih Akin (...) takes a swing at traditional Turkish mores without drawing attention away from the central romance. Although often brutal, the film is also steeped in offbeat humour (check out the coked-up wedding scene) and a tenderness that fully flowers in the lower-key last act.

"Head-On" is too propulsive to let anyone sit around getting moony. Violence, always a more likely prospect than romance in this film, erupts often and disturbingly, raising the question in husband and wife of whether their association has been blessing or curse. Akin lays on too much nastiness and too many false endings, but the film succeeds anyway, fueled by the idea that love can restore a soul even if it can't always conquer all.

Fatih Akin‘s “Head-On” is an energetic blast of extreme situations — it has laughs and tears, goth songs by The Sisters of Mercy alongside Turkish traditionals, the hip bars of Hamburg and the dusty cafes of Istanbul, and — of course — love and hate.

Working from his own script, Akin moves across a territory he knows well, introducing audiences not only to the Turkish community in Germany, whose agonies he has been the most perceptive at documenting document, but also the back streets of Hamburg, where he has shot most of his films. His portrait of the anger and frustration within the Turkish community in Germany, living in an alienated world of its own and torn between its allegiance to the old country and its eagerness to blend in with the new, bristles with the real pain of the transitory state in which it finds itself.