Crickets, It’s Your Turn: Film Review

Although its premise is compelling, Crickets, It’s Your Turn fumbles the landing with a perplexing ending, leaving carefully crafted tension unresolved.

Merey is stuck in the Kazakh countryside after the boyish Nurlan (Ayan Batybek) invites her to his friend’s birthday party. When they arrive, the only other women present are scantily clad sex workers, and Nurlan’s buddies are constantly locked in vulgar and violent conversations. Bahyt (Arnur Kusaingazin), the birthday boy, is given a cake shaped like breasts and gifted a gun. A wall of the house is adorned with portraits of controversial male authority figures, including President Trump and Elon Musk. 

Initially, Korotko’s script rings a series of alarm bells: Crickets, It’s Your Turn repeatedly flags interests and behaviours in men that suggest danger. Merey, a lonesome young woman trapped in the middle of nowhere is at the mercy of the men’s tempestuous moods as they flit between distasteful banter and menacing threats. When the sex workers leave, after a sweet and sincere conversation with Merey, the vibe takes a turn for the worse, and an uncomfortable evening turns into one of survival. 

Rape-and-revenge films are by nature uncomfortable viewing, and Crickets, It’s Your Turn is no different in that regard. To its credit, the film’s sexual violence is tastefully kept off-screen, communicated via an imaginative coping mechanism Merey relies on during times of stress.

But something about the film’s comedically black approach to the genre and its knowing winks to the audience adds another, less welcome level of discomfort. Instead of following convention, expectations are upended that withhold catharsis from an audience who, along with Merey, have been put through an ordeal. A rape-and-revenge film without much revenge is just a rape film. Is the movie a clever and knowing takedown of patriarchy, or is it just a sad mimicking of reality? With the freedom of fiction at its disposal, it is frustrating that Korotko’s film feels depressingly inevitable when it could have provided an escapist, fantastical, justice-driven arc. 

Crickets, It’s Your Turn shares much of its DNA with Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman, a similarly divisive take on the genre with an ending that continues to split audiences. Both are about and depict violence against women but shy away from the opposite; they are more comfortable showing women as victims than as vengeful aggressors, such as in Coralie Fargeat’s ultra violent Revenge.

When Merey says ‘I have cruelty in me too’, we can only wish to have seen more of it. Instead, her moral high ground in a climactic debate suggests a naïveté which belies the creeping, toxic tension from the rest of the film. One of Nurlan’s friends mansplains Jenga to her, before going on to become a key culprit in her assault. The movie itself is sharp in its suspicion of Merey’s surroundings, but Merey herself never seems to learn. Most egregiously, she gives away a gun to one of the men, willingly surrendering power in a powerless situation. 

It’s a shame, since much of Crickets, It’s Your Turn’s set-up is a compelling and timely thesis on what happens behind closed doors when men are free from consequences. Rather than self-police, a fraternity poisons itself from the top-down, encouraging the worst impulses of its loudest members. Not all of the men at Bahyt’s birthday want the night to go as it does, but none of them throw it off-course. When Merey takes the women into another room, their shoulders relax from relief, and they no longer feel they have to act in any sort of way to appease the men. It’s the one brief moment in which everything feels safe in a movie that is explicitly about noticing warning signs everywhere. If only the film had done something better with all of its carefully crafted tension.

Crickets, It’s Your Turn will be screened at the Glasgow Film Festival on March 5, 2025. Read our Glasgow Film Festival reviews and our list of films to watch at the 2025 Glasgow Film Festival!