Onur Saylak’s Chokehold (Boğa Boğa, 2023), written by Hakan Günday, follows Yalın and Beyza, an affluent Istanbul couple who retreat to a village near Assos on Turkey’s northern Aegean coast. Yalın has been implicated in a large-scale investment fraud that ruined many people, including residents of the village. Having cooperated with the prosecutor and informed on his associates, he is provisionally free but still awaiting trial. The couple’s move appears to offer distance from scandal and the possibility of beginning again.

The village, however, does not become a refuge. Its inhabitants recognize Yalın, and some have lost their savings because of him. A place that should feel familiar–the ancestral house, the landscape, the fantasy of a quieter life–becomes saturated with hostility. Yalın is attacked, kills in response, hides bodies, and gradually loses his connection with reality. The more urgently he tries to secure a home, the more completely he turns that home into a scene of danger.

This inversion gives the film its psychological force. Chokehold can be read through Sigmund Freud’s concept of the uncanny: the disturbing moment when what should be intimate, safe, or familiar reveals something concealed and threatening. Saylak’s film is not simply a thriller about a criminal pursued by his victims. It is a story about the impossibility of making oneself at home after trust has been destroyed. Its village, marriage, money, and even its protagonist’s name are organized through doublings in which security and menace occupy the same space.

Freud and the Return of the Familiar

Freud develops the concept of the uncanny in his 1919 essay “Das Unheimliche,” drawing in part on E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman.” His inquiry begins with language. The German word heimlich can mean homely, intimate, or familiar, but it can also refer to something concealed or kept from view. Its apparent opposite, unheimlich, describes what is unfamiliar, eerie, or unsettling. Yet because secrecy is already present within heimlich, the two words do not remain neatly opposed.

For Freud, the uncanny is not simply fear of something unknown. It arises when something once familiar, but hidden or repressed, returns in an altered form. The disturbing object seems both known and unknown. It resembles home while making home impossible. This is why doubles, repetitions, lifelike automata, uncertain identities, and the return of what should have remained buried recur so frequently in uncanny narratives.

Freud’s examples and his account of sexuality reflect the assumptions and limits of early twentieth-century psychoanalysis. His discussion nevertheless provides a productive vocabulary for experiences in which familiarity turns against itself. A house can be both shelter and trap. A loved person can be both the source of security and the keeper of a devastating secret. A name can remain recognizable while changing into an accusation. The uncanny emerges from precisely this inability to decide where safety ends and threat begins.

The Village That Cannot Become Home

For Yalın, the village near Assos initially represents escape. Assos is an ancient settlement and a contemporary tourist destination on Turkey’s Aegean coast, valued for its landscape, stone houses, and imagined distance from metropolitan life. In the film, this geography supports a familiar urban fantasy: leaving Istanbul’s financial pressure and social chaos behind for a slower, more authentic existence.

Yalın and Beyza do not arrive as ordinary rural migrants. Their carefully designed villa, economic resources, and metropolitan habits distinguish them sharply from the local population. Their house may have belonged to Yalın’s father, and villagers remember the family. The place is therefore neither entirely new nor wholly foreign. It is linked to inheritance, memory, and belonging–the materials from which a home is usually made.

But Yalın’s past has arrived before him. Several villagers invested in the Ponzi-style scheme with which he was associated. To them, his comfortable withdrawal is not an innocent search for peace. It is the visible continuation of a class injustice: the man who helped take their savings can still inhabit a beautiful house, while they live with the consequences of his enrichment.

The village becomes uncanny because it is simultaneously where Yalın expects protection and where he encounters the return of his crime. The people who greet him are neighbors and possible assailants. The landscape offers concealment but also exposes him. The house grants privacy while becoming the destination of threats. Assos is both the route through which he might survive and the place in which he may be killed.

This ambiguity is condensed in the film’s violence. Yalın enters a small shop as a customer and finds himself in a struggle that ends in death. Further confrontations follow at the coast and during a classical music concert. Spaces associated with consumption, leisure, and cultivated taste become scenes of attack. Yalın repeatedly experiences the ordinary as potentially lethal, but the film does not allow him the innocence of a conventional victim. The hostility around him has a social history, and each act of self-preservation makes him more dangerous.

Boğa Boğa: Choking, Repetition, and the Double

The international title Chokehold captures the film’s atmosphere of suffocation. The Turkish title, Boğa Boğa, derives from the verb boğmak, “to choke” or “to strangle,” and suggests a repeated or ongoing action. Its doubled sound also resonates with the formal repetitions that structure the story. This does not make the title a simple psychoanalytic code, but its rhythm reinforces a world in which meanings return in altered forms.

The film makes this logic explicit through the transformation of Yalın’s name. Someone leaves a severed snake’s head in a barrel outside his home and changes the inscription Yalın to Yılan–“snake” in Turkish–by rearranging the letters. For an international audience, the threat depends on a wordplay that subtitles cannot fully reproduce. Yalın’s identity remains visible inside the insult, just as the familiar remains visible inside the uncanny. He recognizes his own name and simultaneously encounters a hostile double of it.

The alteration also transforms private identity into public judgment. Yalın may understand himself as a man trying to survive a legal crisis, but the village reads him as deceptive, poisonous, and predatory. The name Yılan externalizes the self he would prefer to hide. His criminal past does not return as an abstract allegation; it takes material form at the threshold of his home.

Doubling also describes Yalın’s position before the law. He is accused yet temporarily free, compromised yet protected by his cooperation with the prosecutor. He has betrayed his partners to save himself, and his conditional liberty requires that he avoid further crime. At the same time, he becomes responsible for new killings. He is both under legal supervision and increasingly beyond the law.

His psychological disintegration follows the same pattern. The danger he perceives is not imaginary: villagers do threaten and attack him. Yet his responses exceed any stable distinction between defense and aggression. He hides evidence, anticipates enemies everywhere, and becomes capable of serial violence. The film’s suspense comes from our inability to reduce Yalın either to persecuted victim or cold-blooded murderer. Each identity contains the other.

Death, Migration, and Displaced Lives

One of the film’s most suggestive scenes brings Yalın into contact with a group of migrants while he is dragging a body through the woods. They are being led toward an irregular crossing to Greece by Gaza, a character from Saylak and Günday’s earlier film More (Daha, 2017). For viewers familiar with that film, the appearance functions as an intertextual return. For others, it remains a stark encounter between two forms of displacement.

Yalın is moving a dead body in order to conceal what he has done. The migrants are moving toward another country in the hope of sustaining life. One journey hides death; the other risks death in search of a future. Yet both take place outside the security of a recognized home. The forest becomes a transit zone for people and bodies that cannot safely remain where they are.

The comparison does not make their situations morally equivalent. Yalın’s displacement is produced by wealth, criminality, and the effort to evade consequences; the migrants’ displacement is structured by precarity and border regimes. Their brief proximity instead reveals the radical inequality contained within the language of escape. Some people can purchase retreat, while others must entrust their lives to clandestine passage. Both experience insecurity, but they do not possess the same resources, responsibility, or freedom.

This scene expands the film’s uncanny geography beyond Yalın’s psychology. Home is not only an emotional category; it is shaped by class, citizenship, property, and mobility. The apparent tranquility of the Aegean landscape exists beside routes of irregular migration, rural deprivation, and metropolitan capital. The beautiful village is not outside history. It is one of the places where unequal histories converge.

Love as an Uncanny Shelter

The film’s most intimate reversal concerns Beyza. Throughout Yalın’s growing paranoia, she appears to be the only person who remains on his side. If the village cannot be trusted, the relationship seems to offer a final home. Yet this security also contains a secret.

Yalın reveals that he has hidden approximately one million euros and proposes that they escape to Greece. Beyza responds by confessing that she reported his financial crimes to the police. She insists that she acted for his sake, hoping to stop him and free their lives from the fraud, while also affirming that she has remained beside him through its consequences.

Her action cannot be categorized easily as either betrayal or care. She loves Yalın and exposes him. She protects him by bringing the law into his life. She is the person closest to him and the person who has secretly dismantled the world he built. Like the word heimlich, intimacy contains concealment within itself.

Yalın has also constructed their relationship through secrecy. He withholds the killings, the hidden money, and the extent of his moral collapse. Each treats the other as home while preventing the other from knowing what that home contains. Their love becomes uncanny not because affection is absent, but because affection and betrayal cannot be separated.

From a psychoanalytic perspective, Yalın repeatedly tries to repress this contradiction rather than work through it. He wants Assos to be peaceful, Beyza to be loyal, the money to provide an exit, and his violence to remain exceptional. Each certainty returns in inverted form. His refuge becomes hostile, his partner becomes an informant, the money becomes evidence of continuing corruption, and self-defense becomes a pattern of killing.

Buying Belonging

In the final movement, Yalın places the hidden money in a barrel and distributes it among the villagers. The act appears to resolve the immediate conflict. Local people, including members of the security apparatus, know or suspect that he has killed, yet his guilt is collectively concealed. Money converts hostility into complicity.

This is not reconciliation. Yalın has not repaired the losses he caused through recognition, accountability, or justice. He has purchased silence with the same medium that structured the original fraud. His solution therefore repeats the problem. Money first separated him from the community; money now produces the appearance that he belongs within it.

The ending intensifies rather than eliminates the uncanny. Yalın is guilty, but the village allows him to occupy the position of someone who is not. The people around him are victims, possible avengers, recipients of his money, and guardians of his secret. They become a community through a transaction that makes genuine trust impossible.

The knowledge shared by the village also means that Yalın can never feel secure. Anyone may expose him. The silence he buys can be withdrawn, renegotiated, or weaponized. What looks like acceptance is another form of suspense. He has acquired protection without achieving innocence and residence without finding a home.

The Class Conflict Beneath the Uncanny

A psychoanalytic reading explains the film’s structure of repetition, secrecy, and unstable identity, but its anxiety also has a material basis. Chokehold stages a conflict between a metropolitan upper-middle-class couple and a rural population whose economic vulnerability has made its members susceptible to promises of rapid enrichment.

Turkey, like many countries, has repeatedly witnessed fraudulent investment schemes that promise extraordinary returns and collapse after drawing in large numbers of small investors. The Turkish phrase saadet zinciri, literally a “chain of happiness,” refers to pyramid or Ponzi-style arrangements. Its optimistic language is itself revealing: the scheme sells not simply profit but the fantasy of escaping economic insecurity.

Yalın embodies the unequal distribution of that fantasy. He possesses the financial and cultural capital to move from Istanbul to an aesthetically desirable Aegean village. Even after scandal, he retains property, mobility, and hidden money. The villagers’ resentment is not merely provincial suspicion of an outsider. It emerges from a hierarchy in which the person who profited from their hopes can still perform withdrawal as a lifestyle choice.

At the same time, the film does not idealize the rural community. Poverty and injury do not automatically produce solidarity or justice. The villagers threaten, attack, bargain, and finally participate in concealing violence. Their effort to recover value from Yalın’s money reproduces the logic that harmed them: survival is privatized, morality becomes transactional, and collective silence replaces legal accountability.

The countryside is therefore not a pure alternative to corrupt metropolitan capitalism. It is one of the locations through which that capitalism circulates. Istanbul’s financial speculation, Assos’s property economy, villagers’ savings, cross-border escape, and the hidden euro notes belong to the same social field. The film’s provincial space is uncanny because the system Yalın claims to have left behind reappears everywhere he goes.

No Home After the Fraud

Chokehold offers no stable border between home and exile, victim and perpetrator, love and betrayal, protection and threat. Yalın’s experiences are organized through doubles, but these doublings are not decorative puzzles. They reveal the collapse of trust produced by financial violence and class inequality.

Freud’s uncanny helps explain why the film’s village feels more disturbing than an entirely alien landscape would. Assos is close enough to home to promise recognition: there is inherited property, remembered family, domestic intimacy, and the possibility of beginning again. Yet everything familiar returns carrying the trace of what Yalın has tried to conceal. The village does not introduce a new danger so much as give his existing history a face.

By the end, Yalın appears to have regained control. His victims accept the money, his crimes remain hidden, and the community permits him to stay. But this arrangement depends on knowledge that everyone shares and no one can safely acknowledge. His new home is built from secrecy, bribery, and mutual suspicion.

The chokehold of the title is therefore more than physical violence. It is the tightening relation between guilt, money, class resentment, and the need to belong. Yalın can silence the village, but he cannot make it familiar again. He survives by buying a place within the community, only to discover that purchased belonging is another form of homelessness.