Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Creature’ On Netflix, A Turkish Drama About A Med Student Who Resurrects His Mentor And Suffers The Consequences

Sometimes you just know, you know? You just know when a show is going to torture viewers with a story that’s padded and drawn out, with performances that are about as subtle as a kick in the shin. A new Turkish drama loosely based on Frankenstein is one of those shows.

CREATURE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A snowy mountain. A voice over says, “Have you ever thought about why people are afraid of the undead?”

The Gist: As a group of explorers sets up camp on that snowy mountain, a strange human-like creature carries a man through the snow. The creature enters the camp, drops the man on the ground, and demands them to “Heal him!”

As the man, a doctor named Ziya (Taner Ölmez), lies in a delirium at the camp, he mutters names and random words. But he’s thinking about his time as a child, when a girl named Asiye (Şifanur Gül) moves in, and as they grow up as siblings, they become very close. Ziya’s father, Muzaffer, Engin Benli, is a doctor, and he taught Ziya about the human body and had him assist him starting from when Ziya was a boy.

As both Ziya and Asiye get older, we see the family on a holiday at the beach. As Ziya’s mother Gülfem (Ümmü Putgül) takes a drink of water that she said tasted off, Ziya discusses with his father his desire to find The Book Of Resurrections, which his father dismisses as fake and a line of work he shouldn’t be pursuing as a med student.

Soon a cholera outbreak runs through the town where Ziya and his family live, and Gülfem contracts the disease. As she gets sicker, she tells Ziya and Asiye to pursue the feelings they have for each other. After her death, Ziya vows to eradicate diseases like cholera and others that could take out entire villages. But he’s also interested in getting a copy of that book on resurrection.

He leaves Asiye to attend medical school in Istanbul. When he goes to his hotel, he meets with the man he thinks has the book for him; they’ve been corresponding for over a year. Instead, the man robs him of everything he has. Ziya has no choice but to find a spot at the medical school to lay his head, hoping he doesn’t get detected. But he also sees a somewhat loony professor named Ihsan (Erkan Kolçak Köstendil), who is shown actually writing The Book Of Resurrection.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Creature, written by Çağan Irmak, is based on the Mary Shelley classic Frankenstein, so any show or movie with a take on the Frankenstein’s monster legend will be a good match here.

Our Take: What Irmak is trying to do in Creature is lay out the relationship between Ziya and Ihsan, and how Ziya used his mentor’s teachings to resurrect the professor after his death. Of course, that tends to lead to all sorts of bad outcomes, including what led the creature that used to be Ihsan to bring a gravely ill Ziya to that village.

But if we have to suffer through the drawn out story of how Ziya met Ihsan and convinced the professor to teach him his resurrection methods, paired with much of the overacting we saw in the first episode, we’d rather just watch old Frankenstein movies over and over.

It’s a very slow-progressing story, and it’s not exactly one we’re that interested in. For one, there are moments that feel disconnected from the rest of the story, like Ziya lying in delirium in the explorers’ village; we’re sure there’s a payoff there at some point, maybe having to do with Ziya’s recovery and reunification with Ihsan, but it feels like it’s going to take the entire show’s run to get there.

But we’re also get the feeling we’re going to be tortured by the runup to the resurrection in the first place. There’s only so many dark moments and yelled dialogue we can take. Sure, Ziya is likely being portrayed to be as crazed as Dr. Frankenstein was in Shelley’s novel, but Ihsan is also a bit unhinged. Are we going to have these unhinged physicians playing off each other for episodes on end before we get to the heart of the story?

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: In a bit of an abrupt ending, Ihsan hears a knock on the door, soothes his dog Darwin, and then lowers a tarp onto what he’s working on, with smoke wafting up from under the tarp.

Sleeper Star: No one really stood out.

Most Pilot-y Line: Ziya’s father takes the family to a leper colony, where the family’s former housekeeper is living since contracting leprosy. Even though both Ziya and his father acknowledge that leprosy can’t be transmitted through touch, he still races to keep Ziya from holding the woman’s hand.

Our Call: SKIP IT. The first episode of Creature is so dark, overwrought and disjointed we’re not going to stick around and find out the answers to any of the questions the episode brought up.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.