“30 March” is a Turkish-language film that executes a “wrong person at the wrong place” concept with a completely wacky approach. While the film is not without its flaws, watching it made us think of how strongly we let the one-inch barrier of subtitles stop us from discovering exceptional content, as was better said by Bong Joon Ho.
’30 March’ Plot Summary: What Is The Film About?
The movie follows Ali, a taxi driver who has recurring nightmares and hallucinations, along with a traumatic domestic situation. His wife has left him, and his son lives with his mother, though he doubts his paternity. One day, a dead body is found in his apartment, and it belongs to Dr. Naeyr, the man that Ali has been having hallucinations about. As he goes on the run trying to figure out what happened, he is aided by his neighbor, Hanam, and his friend Adel, who is a lawyer. From here onwards, the plot gets more wacky and weaker at the same time. As Ali tries to investigate what actually happened, he finds broken pieces of an ID card that lead him to Dr. Hend, who was working with Dr. Naeyr.
The puzzle gets further disjointed from thereon as all of them join hands to find out what happened to Dr. Naeyr, and they are kidnapped and taken to Naeyr’s wife, who tells them to find something that he had been working on. More characters are introduced, and each one of them has enough of that “evil quirky” quality to deserve a movie of their own, but this completely scattered script doesn’t let the audience like them at all.
To put a gist on it, Ali comes to know that Dr. Naeyr was working on a project that could prevent the next global pandemic and that he had distributed this information on two flash drives. The first one, the one they had all been looking for till now, was useless. It was the second flash drive that contained the information, but nobody had any idea where it was.
On the other hand, Hend is advised by Adel to talk to Ali’s psychiatrist about his condition. The psychiatrist reveals that Ali forgets everything that happens on 30 March and that whatever happens on that day comes to him as hallucinations and dreams throughout the year. Ali had killed his wife when he hallucinated that she was having an affair with his brother. But whatever he forgets, he remembers again on 30 March, only to forget it all again. But there is a certain song that triggers his memory, and the doctor suggests that Hend could make use of it.
As they all gather at one place, Ali receives a video recording of Hanam being shot. This is when Hend plays the song that brings back all of Ali’s memories, and he remembers where the second flash drive is.
Major Spoilers Ahead
’30 March’ Ending Explained: Does Ali Survive?
In the end, we see that it was Dr. Naeyr’s wife, Farah, who was the real mastermind behind the whole play, and Ali was just a carefully chosen pawn. The price of his freedom was to hand them the flash drive and Hend. This is something Ali is against, as he does not want to risk Hend’s life, so he asks her to get out of the car and drives it through the warehouse where Farah and her goons are. However, Farah survives and tells him that she was prepared for this as well. Just as she is about to shoot him, she is shot by one of Ali’s associates in this whole charade. But this is far from the end, and the last ten minutes of the movie are where we realize how this was such a wobbly script.
Ali makes his psychiatrist confess that she had an active role to play in the events of 30 March when she helped recruit Ali for the crime. She confesses that she belongs to an international organization that makes use of patients with conditions like Ali’s for purposes of its own.
Next, Ali goes to his mother’s place, where he tells his brother, Rahim, that he got a DNA test done and found out that they were half-brothers. Not only that, he knows that he and Hanam were the ones who planted the body in his apartment and installed a fake app on his phone so that only he could respond to Naeyr’s call for a taxi. He knows Hanam is alive and brings her into the room, tied up. As he is about to shoot her, Rahim stops him, and they both struggle for the gun. The screen fades to black as soon as we hear a gunshot. We can only assume, as Ali himself does, that he is now dead.
Final Words
If reading the script made you think that nothing made sense, then you are right. This film is proof of what happens when you write the first thing that comes to mind without thinking it through-you, sloppily tie the loose ends and make the audience hate you. The movie had such an interesting premise: a person with a mental health disorder, who is clearly a danger to society, is caught up in an international conspiracy to kill a scientist for his research.
“30 March” could have been so much more. It was truly an out-there concept that just needed better writing. Maybe there will be a salvaging point for it in the future because in the first few minutes of the film, and also when we were introduced to some of the bad guys in the story, we felt that we were watching something different, something that could actually surprise us in a time where everything has already been done. But this was not it. We hope to see it picked up and repaired by better minds and hands in the future.
“30 March” is a 2021 Mystery Drama film directed by Ahmed Khaled.
