In LifeLike [+lire aussi :
bande-annonce
fiche film], premiering in the main competition of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, Turkish filmmaker Ali Vatansever plunges viewers into a family in free fall, torn between the starkness of terminal illness and the shimmering illusions of virtual worlds. Interestingly, the helmer's third fiction feature moves between Istanbul’s cramped interiors and VRChat’s neon vistas, weaving a drama that is at once intimate, experimental and uneven in its emotional delivery.

Nineteen-year-old Izzet (played by the talented Onur Gözeten) has been given a prognosis with no margin for hope. Confined to his parents’ flat, bones aching and time ticking down, he flees into VRChat – the one place where his body will not betray him. Inside the platform’s fantastical realms, he dances, jokes and builds a reality far removed from the medical routines that define his days. He fashions a digital companion, wanders through self-designed landscapes and tries, with increasing urgency, to experience fragments of youth that the illness has stripped away.

His parents are left grappling with his decline in very different ways. Reyhan (Esra Kızıldogan), unable to confront what is coming, reinvents herself as a radiant online personality, streaming upbeat videos to a loyal following while privately spiralling into superstition. She clings to rumours of miraculous herbs and rituals, convinced that salvation might still be hiding somewhere between folk remedies and the infinite scroll. Her husband Abdi (Fatih Al), a melancholy school-bus driver, withdraws almost completely. Long stretches go by in which he barely speaks, framed by Vatansever in profile or shadow as if shrinking from the world. Only when he begins seeking spiritual advice does the outline of his moral dilemma come into focus.

Vatansever, himself an educator and VR practitioner, approaches the material with stylistic ambition. The pic’s hybrid visual palette – the grain of everyday life counterpointed with fluorescent VR environments populated by actors performing as their own avatars – creates a sense of porousness between the physical and the digital. The integration is impressively fluid on a technical level, and the contrast between the family’s beige reality and Izzet’s saturated dreamscapes gives the film a strong conceptual backbone. Yet this same device occasionally keeps the viewer at arm’s length, smoothing over emotional textures that the story demands we confront head-on.

The film circles around an impossible question: what does parental love look like when the only thing a child wants is release? The turning point arrives after a failed suicide attempt, which jolts Abdi into action. In one of the film’s most effective developments, he transforms his school bus into a mobile refuge and takes his son on one last journey towards the mountains where Reyhan’s mythical healing plant supposedly grows. As father and son inch closer to an unspoken agreement, the VR and live-action imagery begin to merge – not as spectacle, but as a visual metaphor for the collapsing boundary between hope and surrender.

Performances across the trio are finely wrought, particularly Al’s restrained portrait of a man crushed by helplessness. Some subtle pinches of irony are interspersed throughout, to commendable effect. The film’s pacing, however, wavers in its midsection, and Reyhan’s narrative, though thematically rich, sometimes slips into repetition.

Still, LifeLike stands out for its formally adventurous approach to a delicate subject. Its blend of digital and corporeal worlds may not land flawlessly, but Vatansever’s willingness to push the aesthetic and ethical frame of the family drama makes the movie a distinctive entry in Tallinn’s line-up.

LifeLike was produced by Terminal Film (Turkey), Aktan Görsel Sanatlar (Turkey), Foss Productions (Greece) and Da Clique (Romania).