Hysteria

Esen Işık's Hysteria premiered in the Berlinale Panorama at the Berlin Film Festival in February 2025. The film consolidated Işık, the Swiss-Turkish writer-director after her earlier Köpek (2015), as one of the most distinctive contemporary Turkish-European directors of her generation. The film was widely received as one of the year's most carefully constructed works of European thriller-drama, with critics drawing comparisons to Michael Haneke's Caché for its sustained ethical ambiguity.

The film is a politically charged whodunnit exploring the complex relationship between second-generation German Muslims and their inherited Islamic heritage in contemporary Germany. The film operates simultaneously as a thriller and a sustained examination of identity, family inheritance, and the social-political pressures on second-generation immigrant Germans whose religious-cultural background has been politicised in ways their parents' generation experienced differently.

The film's commitment to a register of slow-burning thriller cinema (long static handheld takes, restrained pacing, the absence of conventional dramatic emphasis) produced one of the most carefully constructed pieces of contemporary German political cinema in recent years. Işık's screenplay-direction commitment to the ethical complexity of the central premise, and the cast's central performances, anchor the film's continuing reputation as one of the most-discussed of the 2025 Berlinale.