Kıble: Bitlisli Belkıs Review: Folk Horror With Atmosphere but No Follow-Through

Is Kıble: Bitlisli Belkıs good?

No — it’s landed near the bottom of the pack for recent Turkish horror, with critics and audiences alike finding the scares undercooked. The film’s regional folklore hook is genuinely distinctive: Bitlisli Belkıs is a healer known across her village for communing with djinn and aiding pregnant women through supernatural means, a figure rooted specifically in eastern Anatolian folk tradition rather than the generic haunted-house imagery most Turkish horror leans on. Hicran Çalı brings a flinty presence to the role. But director Mert Uzunmehmet never finds a consistent rhythm between dread and release, and at a scant 84 minutes the film still manages to feel padded, repeating the same handful of jump-scare beats until they lose all impact.

What is Kıble: Bitlisli Belkıs about?

Three young sisters, orphaned by a sudden tragedy, turn to the feared and mysterious Bitlisli Belkıs for shelter after their aunts abandon them. Belkıs’s reputation as a djinn-communing folk healer makes her both their last resort and a source of dread in her own right. As the sisters settle into her home, it becomes clear that whatever evil claimed their parents has followed them there, and the back half of the film becomes a struggle between Belkıs’s supernatural abilities and a menace that targets everyone under her roof.

Should you watch Kıble: Bitlisli Belkıs?

Only if you’re a completist for regional folk horror and can forgive shaky execution — casual horror fans will likely be bored. The film’s best asset is its setting and folklore, which offer a genuinely different flavor from Western-influenced Turkish horror. Unfortunately, the screenplay doesn’t trust that material enough, cutting away from Belkıs’s rituals and beliefs to chase more conventional stalk-and-scare sequences that the low budget can’t quite support. The sisters’ grief, which could have grounded the horror emotionally, gets similarly shortchanged.

How does it compare to The Witch?

Robert Eggers’s The Witch is the obvious comparison point for folk horror this rooted in regional belief systems, and the gap in execution is stark. Where that film trusted silence, period-accurate dread, and its faith in the audience’s patience, Kıble: Bitlisli Belkıs reaches for loud stingers and rushed exposition instead. There’s a genuinely compelling version of this story buried in its premise — an ostracized healer, three vulnerable sisters, and a belief system rarely explored on screen — but this telling never slows down long enough to let that material do its work.