REVIEW: ‘Make Me Believe’ Was Fine Until It Made One Dumb Mistake

Make Me Believe is a Turkish-language Netflix Original romance written by Selen Bagci and directed by Evren Karabiyik Günaydin and Murat Saraçoglu where two grandmothers conspire to get their adult grandchildren together. It’s not especially interesting in the first place when the grandparents aren’t on screen, which is most of the movie, but by the time it nears its end, it makes one terribly dumb mistake that completely ruined anything I’d previously tolerated about the movie.

On the whole, it’s a classic kind of romance movie: pretty people and pretty scenery with no real character development to speak of. The dialogue is mediocre, the scenes are over-acted, and the horn-heavy romantic score feels dissonant from the Meddeteranian scenery filling your eyes from one scene to the next. There’s not a substantial spark between the main characters, but they’re both hot enough that you can watch it in the background without feeling like you’re wasting time necessarily.

The side-plot of the whole movie is that Sahra (Ayça Aysin Turan) is working for a magazine and is trying to find out the identity of a renowned photographer who has turned down some prestigious award. She finds out that Deniz (Ekin Koç), her childhood crush/enemy who her grandmother is trying to set her up with, is in fact that photographer. So Sahra plots to get him to do an interview with her even though he always refuses to do them. Of course, instead, they fall in love.

Make Me Believe is mostly an innocuous experience except for two areas. I can’t get myself to enjoy Deniz. He is just so clearly designed as a perfect man who does literally nothing wrong, is always kind and helpful, and upon his every word proves his virtuous and saintly nature. In an enemies-to-lovers story, I kind of want to have some animosity toward the love interest. But any potential friction is thrown away early on as the truth behind the couple’s falling out is revealed and it has literally nothing to do with their personalities in the end so much as a random and unrelated incident.

Which is why when the final moment of conflict finally arrives with 15 minutes to spare, it’s just so bad. It’s built entirely off of a moment of immature and uncharacteristically bad communication that was just proven a single scene earlier as outside of Sahra’s normal behavior. It makes you hate Sahra and feel terrible for Deniz in a way that I’m not sure this type of miscommunication or enemies-to-lovers approach could possibly succeed off of. I wasn’t left wondering if they would make up. I was just left wondering if Deniz would be wise enough to just walk away because I could never imagine a perfect person like Deniz tolerating such a brazen lie and painfully-scripted attempt to cover it up when just telling the truth was an option the whole time.

The “other man” who comes in to home wreck the moment that prompts the lie is barely even in the movie prior. It feels totally superfluous and like an ill-conceived moment of conflict just for the sake of conflict that betrays the small amount of growth and character we’ve come to see in the rest of the movie prior.

I didn’t love Make Me Believe from the start, it was just fine as a romance with only so much plot laced in some trauma and adorned by pretty people and places. But its last-minute wrench was not only terribly conceived and terribly written, it also basically destroyed any character growth or consistency the movie had built. It made Sahra look like the good guy after being completely wrong and left Deniz no longer the paragon of perfection that he seemed like the whole rest of the way, all because he’d fallen in love with her. It’s sloppy, it’s disinteresting, and it all could have been avoided if they didn’t feel the need to throw the most over-used trope in the book in at the last second.

Make Me Believe is streaming now on Netflix.