In LifeLike (2025), Ali Vatansever ventures into an intimate and painful territory: that of an ordinary family confronted with the unmovable certainty of death. In a small apartment in a Turkish city, Izzet lives with his parents, Reyhan and Abdi, as his body fades and his world shrinks to a bed. The illness— a word the family avoids, as if naming it could hasten the inevitable— becomes the silent center of domestic life. Reyhan clings to hope with an obstinacy bordering on fantasy, convinced that her homemade remedies and rituals shared with thousands of followers can “heal” what doctors have already declared hopeless. Abdi, meanwhile, turns to faith, unable to accept the prolongation of his son’s suffering, torn between compassion and the idea— forbidden by his religion— of shortening that pain. In this grey corner of existence, the three move between denial, fear, and the desperate need to find meaning in what is happening to them.
Only in the alternative universe of virtual reality does Izzet recover something resembling life: he can walk, dance, talk, become someone capable of experiencing a joy his body can no longer offer. There he meets improbable companions, hybrid and luminous figures who accompany him in a space where nothing hurts. This second life brings him not only comfort but also a new identity, free from the fragility that defines his days. Through this contrast— the glow of avatars versus the thick silence of the real room— the film explores the human need to escape, to invent shelters when reality becomes unbearable, to build parallel worlds where loving, laughing, or feeling the illusion of a future is still possible. As Izzet delves deeper into that virtual cosmos, his mother sinks into the pleasant façade offered by digital influence, and his father drifts amid unanswered prayers and the search for an improbable miracle, whether a healing plant or the possibility of one last shared journey.
The film ultimately becomes a portrait of three ways of facing loss: the pious lie, irrational hope, and the search for transcendence. Vatansever does not judge any of them; he observes them with the same compassion that his protagonist extends to his avatars. LifeLike suggests that technology is not only a means of escaping reality but also a way of revealing what pain hides: the desire to keep living, even if on another plane. In that passage between the real and the imagined, between the inevitable farewell and the worlds we build to endure it, the film finds its emotional power, leaving viewers with a reflection on the ways— sometimes contradictory, sometimes deeply human— in which we confront the irreparable.
