Finding a movie that captures the absolute, soul-crushing exhaustion of the human spirit isn't easy. Most war films go for the big explosions or the heroic last stands, but the 2017 Turkish film The Long Way Home (originally titled Eve Dönüş: Sarıkamış 1915) does something way more uncomfortable. It focuses on the silence. It focuses on the cold. Honestly, if you're looking for a flick that explains the sheer desperation of survival without the Hollywood gloss, this is the one you need to sit down with.
It's 1915. The Ottoman Empire is crumbling. After the disastrous Battle of Sarıkamış, where tens of thousands of soldiers froze to death before they even saw a Russian bullet, the landscape is just a white, frozen graveyard.
Seven people. That’s all we get. They are from totally different walks of life, stuck together in the middle of a literal frozen wasteland, trying to find their way back to a home that might not even be there anymore. It’s bleak. It’s slow. It’s hauntingly beautiful.
What The Long Way Home gets right about historical trauma
Most people think of war movies as "us vs. them." This movie says "everyone vs. the elements." Director Alphan Eşeli doesn't care about the politics of the Great War as much as he cares about the frostbite creeping up a soldier's leg.
You’ve got a group that shouldn't be together. A nurse, a hardened sergeant, a few stragglers. They are moving through the Anatolian mountains, and the cinematography by Hayk Kirakosyan makes the snow look like a character itself. It’s blinding. It’s heavy. You can almost feel the dampness in their wool coats.
The film doesn't rely on massive dialogue dumps to tell you how they feel. We see it in the way they eye a piece of bread. We see it in the way they stop looking at the bodies they pass in the snow because, eventually, a corpse is just a landmark. It’s a masterclass in "show, don't tell," which is why it sticks in your brain long after the credits roll.
🔗 Read more: The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads: Why This Live Album Still Beats the Studio Records
Why the Sarıkamış setting matters more than the plot
If you aren't a history buff, the Sarıkamış campaign is one of those tragedies that gets overshadowed by Gallipoli. But in Turkey, it’s a wound that never quite healed. Over 60,000 soldiers died, mostly from hypothermia.
The Long Way Home takes that massive, incomprehensible number and shrinks it down to seven faces.
The desperation of the ordinary
There is this specific tension when you realize that the enemy isn't the Russian army—it’s a sunset. If they don't find shelter before the sun goes down, they die. Period. The movie strips away the "glory" of war. There are no medals here. There is only the frantic need to keep moving your feet so the blood doesn't stop.
I think we’ve grown too used to "action" in our period pieces. We want the sword fights or the trench charges. Eşeli gives us a psychological horror disguised as a historical drama. The characters start to lose their grip on reality. When you're starving and freezing, your brain does weird things. The film captures that delirium perfectly. It’s sort of like The Revenant, but with a more ensemble, communal sense of dread.
Breaking down the cast and the "Human" element
The performances are grounded. Uğur Polat and Nergis Öztürk carry a lot of the emotional weight. They aren't playing heroes; they are playing people who are scared and, at times, incredibly selfish.
💡 You might also like: Wrong Address: Why This Nigerian Drama Is Still Sparking Conversations
That’s the thing about The Long Way Home. It doesn't pretend that tragedy makes everyone a saint. People get mean. They get greedy. They get desperate enough to do things they’d never do in a warm room with a full belly.
- The Sergeant: He represents the old world, the military structure that failed these people.
- The Nurse: She’s the moral compass, but even her needle starts spinning as the journey gets darker.
- The Stragglers: They are us. The ones who didn't ask for this but are stuck in the gears of history.
It’s a brutal look at how social hierarchies vanish when you’re all equally likely to freeze to death by morning. The film asks: who are you when everything else is stripped away?
Technical brilliance on a budget
You can tell this wasn't a billion-dollar blockbuster, but it looks like it cost twice what it did. The sound design is what really gets me. The crunch of the snow. The wind that sounds like someone screaming in the distance.
The film won the FIPRESCI Prize at the Montreal World Film Festival for a reason. It’s high-art cinema that remains accessible because the core story—going home—is something everyone understands. Even if you don't know a thing about the Ottoman Empire in 1915, you know what it’s like to want to be safe.
Misconceptions about "Slow" Cinema
Some critics called it "slow." I hate that word. It’s deliberate.
📖 Related: Who was the voice of Yoda? The real story behind the Jedi Master
If the movie moved fast, you wouldn't feel the weight of their boots. You wouldn't feel the passage of time. The pacing reflects the reality of the characters. In a survival situation, every minute feels like an hour. By making the audience sit through the long silences, Eşeli forces us into the headspace of the survivors. It’s immersive. It’s not meant to be "fun" in the popcorn sense. It’s meant to be an experience.
What you should do after watching The Long Way Home
If this movie hits you as hard as it hits most people, don't just jump into a comedy to wash it away. Dig a little deeper into the Sarıkamış history. It makes the film even more devastating when you realize how much of it is rooted in the actual accounts of survivors.
Next steps for the curious viewer:
First, look for the high-definition version. The visual contrast between the dark clothes and the white snow is half the experience; watching a grainy stream ruins the atmosphere. Second, check out the director's other work or look into Turkish "New Wave" cinema. There is a whole movement of filmmakers from that region doing incredible, moody work that rarely gets enough play in the West.
Finally, read up on the diary entries from the 1915 campaign. Real soldiers wrote about things that are mirrored in the script—the hallucinations, the "white death," and the strange peace that comes right before the end. It adds a layer of respect to the viewing experience.
This isn't just a movie about a long walk. It’s a movie about what remains of a human being when the world tries to turn them into ice.