The wedding in Heartsong falls apart almost as soon as it starts, and that collapse is where Soner Caner’s love story really begins. As New Indian Express describes it, Sümbül is ridiculed as ‘impure’, the two sides come to blows, and Piroz, who had already won her attention with a Turkish ditty that she answered with her own version, is smitten and vows to return for her. Caner’s 2022 Netflix feature mixes comedy, drama, music and romance, and it commits to all four from that opening wedding instead of settling into one.

Piroz (Erkan Kolçak Köstendil) belongs to the Dom, a nomadic community of musicians. Common Sense Media calls him a fiddler, and The Review Geek has him and his brother hired to play at the wedding. Readysteadycut says Caner sets the tone with music and with Piroz’s way of seeing things: he finds joy in small matters because his father was so carefree and so close to his creative side. That father is Mirze (Bülent Emin Yarar), a widower who, per the same outlet, comes back to town to rekindle an old flame. The film therefore runs two quests side by side, the son’s chase after Sümbül and the father’s late-life longing, and readysteadycut counts three generations of men each coping with love and loss in his own way. The Review Geek calls the two stories two sides of the same coin, and that is the script’s best idea: father and son want the same thing and go about it differently.

The performances carry most of the weight. New Indian Express singles out Hazar Ergüçlü’s radiant Sümbül and credits her and Köstendil with terrific chemistry, to the point that it is hard not to root for the couple even when the obstacles are familiar. The Review Geek calls the pair oddballs in a pure and innocent way, charming from their first scene. Yarar earns his own shout-out from that outlet for Mirze, and New Indian Express finds something quietly moving in his bittersweet longing for an imaginary Dilo. A man chasing a woman who may exist only in his memory is a funny image and a sad one, and it keeps the father’s story from reading as filler. Around them the supporting cast is large: Ali Seçkiner Alıcı as Hogır, Selim Bayraktar as Kalender, Şevval Sam as Sefure, Asiye Dinçsoy as Hatun, Nazmi Kırık as Seymen, Ferit Kaya as the groom and Yıldırım Şimşek as Mürşit. New Indian Express adds the local shaman, forever berated as a fraud, to the subplots that make the village feel inhabited.

The craft is what most reviewers praise first. The Review Geek admires the lilting camera movements, the warm colour palette and the whimsical folk music, and notes that close-ups let faces fill the frame with emotion. The same writer enjoys the Dom households, a ramshackle, noisy, bickering extended family. New Indian Express says the folk songs keep the tone light and matter most in the scenes of grief. When the bride’s own father plans to have her killed, as that outlet describes, keeping the mood buoyant is a gamble, and it mostly pays off.

It also creates the film’s biggest problem. Common Sense Media notes that Heartsong makes light of violence and presents superstitions and traditions as backward and laughable, yet charming. Its list of incidents shows how much the film asks a light tone to carry: people shoot each other, a wedding turns into a brawl, a woman drinks a potion that makes her look dead and is later dug out of her grave, and an exorcist is called in to drive demons out of someone. The same review points out that women are treated as property, and that a groom rejects his bride over her supposed lack of virginity without ever saying how he knows. The Review Geek concedes that the film does not dive deep into these issues, though it holds that Sümbül’s journey is a race toward freedom from society’s constraints. That is a generous reading. The virginity accusation and the threat from her father work as plot mechanics, and the film has little to say about them as subjects.

The story itself is the other weak point. Readysteadycut wanted a unique romantic comedy with room for many different journeys and concluded that the story was not strong enough to hold them. New Indian Express is kinder but agrees on the raw material: a soap opera-like plot of elopement, revenge and romance inside a goofy premise, with challenges that are not the most novel. Its reviewer, raised on Indian cinema, recognises the formula and still finds the treatment never over the top.

I side with the warmer critics, though not without reservations. Heartsong does not reinvent the star-crossed romance, and its violence sits badly beside the gags. Yet Ergüçlü and Köstendil are easy to believe in, the folk songs do their work in the grief scenes, and the Dom households give the film a texture the plot alone could not supply. The means are small and the structure lumpy, but I forgive both because Caner lets the community at the centre bicker, sing and grieve.