The opening scene of Make Me Believe sets the tone: two elderly women, Zerrin Sümer and Yıldız Kültür, huddle together like conspirators plotting a heist. Their mission is to trick their adult grandkids into rekindling a flame that fizzled out somewhere back in childhood. It’s a premise that should sparkle with mischief, and for a few minutes it does. Then directors Murat Saraçoğlu and Evren Karabıyık Günaydın let the film stumble out of its own gate.

Sahra (Ayça Ayşin Turan) and Deniz (Ekin Koç) share a history that goes back decades. Their grannies’ meddling engineers a meet-cute at a café, where Sahra’s coffee spills straight into Deniz’s lap. The scene wants to be playful. Instead the chemistry between Turan and Koç comes across as flat as the spilled latte on screen — their scenes lean on stock banter instead of anything that feels like two people actually falling for each other again.

The film finds sturdier ground once it turns to Sahra’s life as a musician. Her struggle to keep making the music she wants, against pressure to play it safe, gives Turan something to work with beyond reaction shots to Koç’s grin. The scenes of her rehearsing, arguing with herself over a half-finished song, or freezing on stage carry more tension than anything in the central romance, and they’re where the film’s better instincts show through. It’s a shame the script treats this thread as a detour rather than the spine it could have been — Deniz keeps pulling focus back toward the will-they-won’t-they, and every time he does, the film loses momentum it had just built.

The romance itself never recovers from that shaky opening. Turan and Koç are watchable performers stuck reciting lines that don’t ask much of them, and the reconciliation, when it comes, feels handed to the characters rather than earned by them. Jokes fall back on pratfalls and mistaken-identity setups that were tired before this film borrowed them.

The supporting cast fares better across the board. Naz Çağla Irmak and Çağrı Çıtanak, as Ahu and Ulas, bring a lightness that the leads can’t quite manage, while Bülent Gültekin’s Mert and Kemal Okan Özkan’s Kerem add friction to the friend-group scenes that the main plot badly needs. Between them, these four do more to sell the film’s warmth than the two people it’s supposedly about.

Visually, the film plays it safe — soft lighting, bright interiors, nothing that announces itself. The soundtrack is the one place the craft matches the ambition of the story: original songs sit alongside covers, and in the scenes tied to Sahra’s music career, the two reinforce each other in a way the screenplay’s dialogue rarely manages on its own.

The reception outside Turkey has split along similar lines. Jason Flatt, reviewing for But Why Tho, gave it a lukewarm 4.5 out of 10, calling it merely fine as a romance with limited ambitions beyond that. IMDb user reviews have been blunter, calling the plot predictable and describing the connection between Sahra and Deniz as dry to the point of feeling unfinished — a complaint that lines up with what plays out on screen. Other viewers have been kinder to the cast, praising a naturalness to the performances that the writing doesn’t always earn.

Both readings are right, in their way. Make Me Believe has real affection for its characters and clearly believes in the story it’s telling about family, meddling, and second chances. What it’s missing is a central couple whose spark matches that ambition. Trim the detours, sharpen the two leads’ scenes together, and there’s a genuinely charming film buried in here. As it stands, the movie you get is the one where the grandmothers, the friends, and the music outshine the romance they were all scheming to make happen.