New York City’s neon spills across Beren Saat’s face as she trades a knowing glance with Kıvanç Tatlıtuğ at an airport bar, and that single exchange sets the tone for Gönenç Uyanık’s Last Call for Istanbul. There’s no throat-clearing here: Serin and Mehmet, both married, both strangers until minutes earlier, are drawn together, and what follows is a night of stolen looks, half-finished sentences, and decisions neither of them can fully explain. Saat and Tatlıtuğ have real chemistry. Their performances stay low and controlled, built on yearning rather than tears.

Uyanık keeps the tension taut throughout. New York itself is never merely scenery here; its streets double as a map of the moral bind Serin and Mehmet have wandered into, closing in on them scene by scene rather than simply framing the action. One of the film’s most effective sequences sends Serin walking alone through Brooklyn at dawn; the empty blocks make her isolation feel physical rather than stated. Ambient noise does real work in this scene, distant sirens, a taxi horn somewhere off-frame, and it keeps the moment tethered to the real city rather than a postcard version of it.

The film isn’t only about the spark between its leads. Senan Kara, as the psychologist, supplies a few welcome beats of humor amid all the brooding. Zihan Zhao’s Fenhua gives the story an added layer, her scenes touching on the friction of navigating a culture that isn’t quite her own. The film’s interest in identity and longing lands more often than not, even when the dialogue occasionally states what the performances have already made clear.

Pacing is where the film runs into trouble. The first act moves with real urgency, but by the third act Uyanık seems to be racing to close every thread at once, and the rush costs the story some of the weight it had earned. A subplot involving Michael Loayza’s Davi and Susan Slatin’s Jane never develops past its function as exposition; both characters feel bolted on rather than woven in. A tighter edit might have cut the thread altogether rather than leaving it half-built. The nighttime cinematography fares better: shots of the city’s chaos and quiet sit well together, even if a few establishing shots run longer than they need to and blunt the momentum just when the story should be picking up speed.

Saat carries much of the film on her face alone; her Serin is a woman split between obligation and want, and Saat lets the conflict show in silences rather than speeches. Tatlıtuğ matches her, playing Mehmet’s charm as a kind of cover for insecurities he’d rather not name. Together they make the quieter scenes, a diner conversation late at night, trading confessions and jokes in roughly equal measure, the film’s clear high point, and some of the sharpest, least melodramatic writing in the picture lives there.

Where Last Call for Istanbul struggles is in distinguishing itself from the meet-cute films it’s clearly drawing on. The premise, two strangers, one night, a city that never quite goes to sleep, is familiar enough that the film needs more than mood to set itself apart, and it doesn’t always find it. As both romance and drama, the film keeps trying to have it both ways, tender in one scene and clinical in the next, and that indecision is part of what keeps it from fully landing. What separates the good scenes from the flat ones is almost always specificity: the diner conversation works because it’s about these two people in particular, while some of the surrounding scenes could belong to any pair of strangers in any city.

At its core, Last Call for Istanbul is a story about the geography of temptation, one night, one city, two marriages left several thousand miles away in name if not in fact. The film is smart to let that distance do quiet work: Serin and Mehmet are answerable to people who never appear in a single frame, and the film never lets the audience forget it, even in its most intimate scenes. That tension, between what New York allows and what home would forbid, is the strongest idea the script has, and it’s a shame the back half doesn’t trust it enough to slow down and sit with it.

Annie McCain Engman’s June and Joy Donze’s Sophie round out the ensemble with a naturalism that grounds the New York scenes, even though neither character gets much room to breathe on the page. Their brief exchanges with the leads add small, human texture to a story that could otherwise feel hermetically sealed around its two stars. Sean Ardalan’s Shawn and Daniel Kwiatkowski’s Phil drift through the margins of the same world, one more reminder that this is a city full of people living lives the film never quite has time for.

Sound plays a bigger role than it might first seem. The hum of the city, glasses clinking somewhere off to the side, all of it stitched together to keep even the quieter scenes feeling lived-in rather than staged. It’s a small craft choice, but it does a lot of the film’s emotional labor, filling in atmosphere the script sometimes rushes past, and it’s one of the more consistent pleasures across the whole runtime.

What Last Call for Istanbul gets right, it gets right because of Saat and Tatlıtuğ. The film leans on them almost entirely, and for the most part, they’re strong enough to hold it up. Whatever its flaws, it never forgets that a single night can carry the weight of an entire marriage, and it’s that conviction, more than any twist in the plot, that keeps the film from ever feeling weightless.