Abandoned Man

The Unseen Weight of a Second Chance

I keep thinking about the way Baran walks. Not the swagger of a man who’s just been released from prison after fifteen years—though he has—but the slow, deliberate shuffle of someone who’s forgotten how to move through the world without looking over his shoulder. Abandoned Man (2025), the latest Turkish drama from director Çağrı Vila Lostuvalı, is a film about the quiet violence of re-entry: the way freedom can feel like another kind of confinement when the past clings to you like a second skin. It’s not a perfect film—its structure creaks under the weight of its own ambitions, and its emotional beats sometimes feel too neatly arranged—but in its best moments, it captures something true about the way people rebuild themselves, one fractured piece at a time. Lostuvalı, a veteran of Turkish television known for her work on series like Masumlar Apartmanı and Çöp Adam, brings a television director’s eye for intimate, character-driven storytelling to this, her first standalone feature. That background shows in the way she frames her actors: close, unflinching, as if she’s trying to peer beneath their skin. The film’s visual language is one of restraint—long takes, muted colors, a camera that lingers just a beat too long on a face or a gesture, as if waiting for the truth to surface. There’s a moment early on where Baran (Mert Ramazan Demir) stands in the doorway of his brother’s apartment, his body half in shadow, half in light. The shot lasts only a few seconds, but it tells you everything you need to know about where he’s been and where he’s going. Or, more accurately, where he’s afraid to go.

The premise is simple, almost archetypal: a man wrongly imprisoned for a crime his brother committed is released into a world that has moved on without him. Baran’s brother, Fatih (Edip Tepeli), is now a family man with a wife and daughter, Lidya (Ada Erma), who becomes the unexpected key to Baran’s redemption. The film’s central relationship—between Baran and Lidya—is where Abandoned Man finds its emotional core. Their bond is tender but never saccharine, grounded in the kind of quiet, wordless understanding that only exists between people who’ve known loss. Lidya, played with remarkable naturalism by Ada Erma, is the film’s secret weapon. She’s not a precocious child spouting wisdom or a plot device to soften Baran’s edges; she’s a real kid, with all the messy, unpredictable energy that entails. In one scene, she climbs onto Baran’s lap while he’s fixing a car engine, her small hands mimicking his movements as if she’s trying to absorb his skill, his patience, his very presence. It’s a small moment, but it’s the kind of scene that lingers long after the credits roll. That said, Abandoned Man struggles with its own ambition. The film wants to be both a gritty character study and a redemptive melodrama, and it doesn’t always reconcile the two. The first act moves at a deliberate pace, allowing Baran’s isolation and simmering resentment to fester. There’s a subplot about Baran being conned out of his garage rental, another about his brief stint as a homeless man with Lidya in tow, and a third about his fraught relationship with Fatih, who oscillates between guilt and defensiveness. Each of these threads is emotionally resonant on its own, but together they start to feel like a series of trials designed to test Baran’s resolve rather than organic developments in his journey. Critics have been divided on this point. Decider called the film “predictable and episodic,” arguing that it sends its characters through “neat cycles of hardship and reward” that ultimately make it “too simplistic for its own good.” There’s some truth to that. The film’s six-month time jump, for instance, skips over the messy, day-to-day work of reconciliation between Baran and Fatih, leaving their eventual rapprochement feeling unearned. But I’d argue that the film’s simplicity isn’t always a flaw—sometimes, it’s a feature. Abandoned Man isn’t trying to reinvent the wheel; it’s trying to tell a story about the quiet, unglamorous work of healing, and in that regard, its straightforwardness can be disarming. As one reviewer for Common Sense Media put it, the film “seems to have its heart in the right place, but the story is messy, alternately meandering, slow, and cliched.” That messiness, though, is part of what makes it feel real. Life, after all, isn’t a neatly structured three-act play. It’s a series of fits and starts, of progress and regression, and Abandoned Man captures that rhythm better than most redemption stories I’ve seen.