Trap (2019, Turkey) Seyid Çolak

Seyid Çolak’s Trap Joins the Auteur Cinema Archive

The Auteur Cinema Archive is proud to announce the inclusion of Trap (2019, Turkey), the feature debut of Seyid Çolak—a taut, atmospheric meditation on isolation, fear, and the slow unraveling of community. With remarkable restraint and visual precision, Çolak crafts a world as quietly suffocating as it is haunting, earning his place among contemporary auteurs who reshape genre through style and nuance.

Set on a remote island, Trap follows five fishermen whose lives are defined by routine and quiet interdependence—until one of them mysteriously disappears. As suspicion festers and a wolf arrives to claim space of its own, a creeping tension builds among the remaining men. What unfolds is not just a thriller but a psychological descent into distrust and animal instinct, evoked through silence, glances, and the oppressive weight of unspoken fear.

Despite the film’s primal themes, Trap deliberately avoids genre clichés. There are no jump scares, no over-scored revelations, no narrative hand-holding. Instead, Çolak relies on atmosphere, sound design, and spatial composition to evoke dread. The sea, the fog, the barren land—they become characters in themselves, watching, enclosing, and bearing witness to the quiet disintegration of camaraderie.

Curator Kris De Meester on the film’s inclusion:
"Trap is a masterclass in building a claustrophobic world without relying on cinematic shortcuts. Seyid Çolak strips the thriller genre down to its essential psychological core—turning silence into tension, landscape into pressure. His restraint is what makes the film so deeply unsettling. It’s an auteur vision that trusts the audience to feel what’s not being said."

Premiering at the 41st International Moscow Film Festival, Trap was selected for the main competition, followed by a European premiere at the Madrid International Film Festival, where it was nominated for Best Foreign Language Feature and Best Director of a Foreign Language Film. It also screened at the Brussels Independent Film Festival, where its minimalist yet gripping approach was praised by juries and audiences alike.

With Trap, Çolak emerges as a director unafraid of silence, ambiguity, and the slow, deliberate tightening of narrative tension. His ability to evoke primal human fears without spectacle places him firmly within the canon of auteurs who transform minimal resources into powerful psychological landscapes.

The inclusion of Trap in the Auteur Cinema Archive is a recognition of its elegance, its intelligence, and its refusal to compromise. It is a film that lingers—in mood, in memory, and in the shadows between men and beasts.