Chokehold opens on water that looks too calm to trust, and Onur Saylak wastes no time proving the point wrong. Yalın and Beyza arrive in a small town on the Aegean coast, not far from Assos, looking for a fresh start after fleeing a financial scandal back in Istanbul. Within days, the locals make it clear that fresh starts are not on offer here. The film premiered on Netflix in April 2023, running a lean 112 minutes, and it never really slows down long enough to let its characters breathe.

Kıvanç Tatlıtuğ plays Yalın as a man who has already lost the argument with himself before the story even starts. He negotiated his way out of prosecution for a Ponzi scheme that stole millions, and the deal came at a price: he’s banned from international travel, and he can’t stop wondering who informed on him. Tatlıtuğ leans into that paranoia instead of softening it, and it’s some of his better work in years. Funda Eryiğit, as Beyza, gets the harder role — playing loyalty curdling into self-preservation in real time — and she never overplays a single scene.

Saylak, working from a script by the novelist Hakan Gunday, builds dread the slow way: long takes, few cuts, a camera that lingers on the town just a beat past comfortable. For most of the running time, that patience pays off. Gürgen Öz, as Daim, and Müge Bayramoğlu, as Nehir, carry much of the tension inside the town itself; Öz in particular makes an impression without needing many lines to do it. Onur Gürçay, Aşkın Şenol and Hayat Van Eck round out an ensemble that keeps deepening the sense that the whole place is in on something.

Then the third act arrives, and the film loses its nerve, or perhaps just its interest in explaining itself. The confrontation between Yalın and the town tips into territory that doesn’t fully add up, and the ending drops several threads instead of tying them off. Some will call that deliberate, a refusal to hand out easy resolution. I’m not convinced. Chokehold spends most of its 112 minutes teaching its audience to expect a reckoning, then swerves away from one at the last moment. That isn’t ambiguity. It’s a film unsure how to land the plane it built.

This premise has company right now, too. One review of the film noted that its setup — outsiders moving into a close-knit rural community that turns out to want them gone — overlaps with Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s The Beasts, and Chokehold doesn’t do quite enough to separate itself from that comparison beyond swapping Galicia for the Aegean.

Where the film does stand on its own is in what it’s actually about underneath the thriller plotting: money, and what people will do to the man who took it and got to start over somewhere prettier. Yalın’s scheme isn’t an abstraction — Ponzi collapses of exactly this kind have made headlines in Turkey in recent years, and the town’s hostility reads less like generic suspicion of outsiders and more like a specific, local grudge against someone who cheated and still landed on his feet. Saylak doesn’t spell any of this out. He lets the silences between Yalın and the townspeople carry it, which is the smartest instinct in the film.

The coastline itself does real work here. Saylak shoots the town as a place with nowhere to hide — water that should feel open but instead closes in, because everyone on it seems to know something Yalın doesn’t. That claustrophobia is the film’s real achievement, more than any of its plot mechanics. Even when the story stumbles badly near the end, the sense of being watched never once lets up.

Chokehold isn’t a clean success. It’s a tense, handsomely shot thriller that talks itself into a corner it can’t quite talk its way back out of. But for most of its length, Tatlıtuğ and Eryiğit make that corner worth watching them walk into.