Ghost Song: Fatih Akin's haunting meditation on love, grief and what comes after death

Is there anything more potent than young love? The fireworks of desire fuelled by adolescent hormones that make the promise of everlasting romance feel like life or death if you can’t be with the one person who has captured your heart?

German-Turkish film director and screenwriter Fatih Akin distils the palpable expression of first love in his latest drama, Ghost Song.

Opening the San Sebastian International Film Festival, it follows two star-crossed teenagers in Germany, forever tied together by the tragic circumstances of their meeting.

Farah, or Farasha to her friends, a name that means ‘butterfly’ in Arabic, is the eldest of five sisters and is mourning her father’s death at his grave on the same day that she passes her high school exams. That evening, she attends a graduation party for students from across the city, where she meets Faris.

At first, their eyes linger as she dances to Arab trap and he glides past. Later, they both find themselves at the bar trying to order some water.

She is a hijabi Muslim and a Syrian refugee; he is of mixed German-Turkish heritage and the designated driver for the night.

The film might be in luscious black and white, but Mariam Dawoud and Eren M. Güvercin exude the stirrings of adoration with such blushing delight that it radiates off the screen.

One might assume that coming from different walks of life, amid the historical friction between Turks and Arabs, will be the root of the film’s conflict.

Farasha’s othering is felt early on, when the bartender ignores her pleas to be served and instead answers Faris. His best friend Max (Gabriel-Winner Amorim) calls her a 'jihadi ninja' as he questions why they are offering a lift home to Farasha and her inebriated best friend, Una (Carlotta von Falkenhayn).

But as a thunderous bolt of lightning crackles across the night sky, their romantic future is extinguished, at least in the corporeal world.

Here, Akin and Ruth Toma’s script takes a turn into the supernatural, with Faris waking up in a hospital bed and slowly, heartbreakingly, realising that he took a wrong turn and crashed his car into a river.

Everyone survived, apart from Farasha.

A love that lingers

Güvercin carries the profound grief and guilt of her death in every wide-eyed stare, the tension in his body and his inability to truly process her loss.

But Farasha has not passed on. She remains in the spiritual world, watching Faris mourn at the crash site, her sisters prepare her body for its final rest, and her tearful loved ones throw dirt onto her grave at her funeral.

She doesn’t need to fade away into memory just yet. The film’s conceit is that she can pierce the veil between life and death by visiting those who remember her in their dreams for 40 days.

Despite a warning from her ghostly father, Farasha begins nightly excursions into Faris’ mind, and their courtship continues with the same rigorous passion, even if it is always tinged with the melancholic notes of Malakoff Kowalski’s score.

For this is a doomed romance, akin to Orpheus and Eurydice, and no matter how much they laugh, dance and love in the darkness of their dreams, the sunrise will always pull them apart. For both of them, that separation proves untenable.

As their love deepens, the journey gets darker, with depression and suicide entering the devastating equation.

Some scenes are truly harrowing, but never overwrought with melodramatic displays.

Even at its most discomforting, Dawoud and Güvercin earn your empathy through their sensitive portrayal of two teenagers desperately in love who cannot let go, even when the consequences become all the more unbearable for those left behind.

Lama Alhalabi and Anna Bederke, as Farasha and Faris’ mothers respectively, showcase the poignant motherly devotion and pain of losing a child, whether physically or psychologically.

Yet flashbacks to that fateful night, captured breathtakingly by cinematographer Frank Griebe in the inky black depths of the water, reveal the courageous truth of Farasha’s demise.

Akin ends the film with a life vest for the lovers to cling to, offering hope, acceptance and spiritual ease in the sea of sorrow that is their love story.

Hanna Flint is a British-Tunisian critic, broadcaster and author of Strong Female Character: What Movies Teach Us. Her reviews, interviews and features have appeared in GQ, the Guardian, Elle, Town & Country, Mashable, Radio Times, MTV, Time Out, The New Arab, Empire, BBC Culture and elsewhere

Follow her on Instagram: @hannainesflint