The moment Dilara Basaran (Neslihan Atagül) steps onto the shampoo commercial set, her perfectly coiffed hair and designer wardrobe collide with a modest kitchen backdrop. It’s a small, precise jolt, and it sets up the whole conceit of Oh Belinda: a vain actress dropped into the life of the ordinary housewife she is paid to play. Director Deniz Yorulmazer leans hard into the absurdity of that premise. He never quite commits to the whimsy it demands.

The film remakes Atıf Yılmaz’s 1986 comedy Aaahh Belinda, which won Best Film, Best Director and Best Actress at the Antalya Golden Orange Film Festival for Müjde Ar’s performance as Serap. That pedigree sets a bar this Netflix version struggles to clear. Billed, like the original, as an even mix of drama, comedy and fantasy, Oh Belinda rarely lets those three registers share a scene comfortably. The idea is ripe for satire, somewhere between a body-swap fantasy and a Turkish soap opera, but Yorulmazer’s direction keeps drifting between registers instead of settling into one.

Cinematographer Tolga Cetin gives the film a clean, glossy look, tracking the contrast between Dilara’s designer world and the drab household she wakes up in. Sleek visuals cannot fix structural problems, though, and Oh Belinda has plenty. Atagül carries most of the weight herself, swinging between haughty arrogance and genuine panic; her scenes on the commercial set, sneering at the domestic drudgery she’s supposed to perform, land hardest. Necip Memili, as her put-upon love interest Necati, gives steady support without much room to do more. Around them, Gamze Karaduman as Feride, Sacide Taşaner as Elmas, Kamil Güler as Levent and Anıl Çelik as Cem round out the household Dilara wakes up trapped in, though the film rarely gives any of them more than a single trait to play.

The comedy is inconsistent. It flares up, then gets buried under fantasy machinery that the script never bothers to explain. One good sequence has Dilara failing, again and again, to convince her new family that she is not their long-suffering housewife. That absurdity, an actress fumbling through domestic chores she has never had to do, should have produced richer laughs. Instead the film rushes past it toward the next plot beat.

The fantasy logic itself barely holds together. Why does Dilara’s transformation touch only her surroundings and not her memory? How does a character built for the 1980s let her keep a fully modern sensibility? Oh Belinda never answers, and the plot ends up limping forward on convenience rather than coherence.

There’s a sharper film buried somewhere in here, one willing to needle vanity and class with real teeth. This one mostly settles for blunt jabs. Its best material, Dilara’s initial panic, her early attempts to claw back some control, keeps getting crowded out by filler: meandering family-dynamics subplots, rom-com beats borrowed wholesale from a dozen other movies.

The ending brings Dilara back around to something like peace with her double life. It’s a resolution the film has clearly been aiming for since the opening scene, and it plays fine in the moment. It also arrives fast, without much room to sit with what she has actually learned.

Reception abroad has split along familiar lines. Decider called it decently entertaining despite the thinness of its plotting. Rotten Tomatoes audiences responded to the Turkish specificity of the setting but bristled at how clumsily the film handles its would-be tragic undertones. The Fandomentals wrote it off as a movie that never settles on an identity. High On Films warned viewers hoping for multiverse-scale stakes that they were in the wrong theater entirely.

None of that critical split is unfair. Oh Belinda is a story about identity, class and the performance built into traditional gender roles, and there’s a real idea in watching a successful actress get forced to live inside the character she privately looks down on. But the film keeps flinching from its own premise, cutting to a joke or a subplot right when the material gets interesting. What’s left is a setup sturdier than anything Yorulmazer builds on top of it.