Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Do Not Disturb’ on Netflix, a Nutty Turkish Sort-of-Comedy About a Man Who’s Losing His Marbles

Turkish comedian Cem Yilmaz writes, directs and stars in Do Not Disturb (now streaming on Netflix) an off-offbeat comedy taking place during one chaotic night shift at an ever-so-slightly seedy hotel. Yes, that’s two “off”s before that “beat,” as Yilmaz channels a little COVID-derived stir-craziness into this story of a kind weirdo who encounters a few other weirdos on his first day on a new job, and slowly loses his mind, I think. And I say “I think” because this is a rather odd one that’s either muddled or left open to interpretation – or both, maybe?

DO NOT DISTURB: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Two years into the pandemic, Metin (Yilmaz) has got to get out of this little room. This little room, in an apartment with his mother, who we only experience as an offscreen voice going on about how he needs to get married. He’s 50, and the pandemic resulted in him losing his job on a ferry, apparently serving food or drinks, since he nicknames himself Ayzek, as in Isaac, the Love Boat bartender. His mom lines up a job for him, working the front desk of a hotel, where there just so happens to be a female employee she thinks he should meet. She and her mother have already talked about marriage potential, so hey, no pressure, Metin. 

Our protag reports to work and is given a bright green blazer to wear and a nametag with a typo: Cetin, it reads. An auspicious start, I’d say. His prospective love interest works in the laundry room; he makes small talk with Suhal (Ahsen Eroglu), and it’s so awkward, about how he used to work on a ship and how he couldn’t get his noticeably messed-up teeth repaired due to the pandemic, you just want to jam a ball of yarn in his piehole. And it’s not just her – he talks on and on about this stuff to anybody who’ll listen. It’s a slow night at the hotel, because we only meet two customers: Bahtiyar (Celal Kadri Kingolu), an intellectual who tries to give Metin his beloved saxophone because he’s suicidal, and Davut (Bulent Sakrak), a somewhat enigmatic ex-con who seems nice enough, and not just because he keeps tipping Metin hundreds of lira at a time. Two other characters factor into the loosey-goosey plot, Saniye (Ozge Ozberk), the heavy-drinking night-shift pharmacist next door, and an unpredictable lunatic on the street who harasses passersby and, during one nearly incomprehensible episode, ends up stabbing Metin in the buttocks.

Did I mention that Metin is addicted to watching self-help Instagram videos by a phony-cheerful influencer (Nilperi Sahinkaya), thus rendering him a character with two additional annoying qualities: One, he parrots pseudopsychological jibber-jabber in conversations that would otherwise be tolerable. And two, he’s one of those people who awkwardly holds up his phone so others can watch a video they clearly don’t want to watch. And Yilmaz thinks we’ll want to spend nearly two hours with this guy? Anyway, Metin’s night gets pretty wild after the buttocks-stabbing incident, and it’s almost like everyone forgot that he was in pain and lost a lot of blood, although the latter trait could explain some of the maladroit surrealism that occurs after that, including his giving Bahtiyar one of his antidepressants and therefore depriving himself of it, which prompts some nutty hallucinations and extreme deviations from his character. And at this point all I can say is, hanging on through all this was a challenge.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Do Not Disturb brings to mind the one-crazy-night vibe of Good Time and the Turkish-noir tone of 10 Days of a Good Man – but it’s not nearly as good as those two films.

Performance Worth Watching: These characters, as written? Oof. But Sakrak is pretty good at maintaining a sense of mystery to his character, who’s equal parts agreeable and sketchy.

Memorable Dialogue: Maybe the comedy is lost in translation with some of these lines, e.g., “I’m not pizza. I can’t please everyone!”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: I appreciated the irony of Metin, during his break from reality, hanging a doorknob DO NOT DISTURB sign around his neck, when he’s already clearly disturbed. Beyond that, Do Not Disturb is uneven and tonally muddled, Yilmaz’s apparent attempt to spot-weld quirky character-driven comedy to a third-act mindf—. It might help if Metin had a better entry point to his vulnerabilities, and had more endearing qualities, instead of being a mugging, self-obsessed doofus. At the point I realized I wanted this man to go away, there was still 90 minutes of movie remaining. And I sighed deeply.

Yilmaz struggles to maintain a sense of pace in what’s essentially a single-location movie; it plays out in a few rooms in the hotel, occasionally venturing out to the neighboring pharmacy, and lacks the visual variety to make the film feel like it’s going somewhere. Scenes play out longer than necessary, suggesting the need for a more judicious edit, and the lengthy is-it-real-or-is-it-a-hallucination sequence quickly gets wearisome. I interpreted the film as Yilmaz venting his COVID-related frustrations by addressing common struggles with mental illness and social media addiction, but his ideas struggle to get much traction in this muddled screenplay. It’s easy to appreciate his attempt to knuckle down and deliver a wild third act, but the more interesting the movie gets, the more incoherent it gets.

Our Call: Do Not Disturb has a lot on its mind, but I’ll be damned if I can decipher any of it clearly. SKIP IT. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.