A pampered heir who thinks jail cannot touch him gets an unusual education in Simarik, a Turkish remake of a well-known Russian comedy.
What is Simarik about?
Born into wealth and raised to believe consequences are for other people, the young man at the center of Simarik finally pushes his luck too far and lands on the verge of prison. His father, unwilling to watch his son destroy himself, arranges a strange intervention: an isolated village rebuilt down to the last detail as it would have looked more than a century ago. Dropped into that reconstructed world and cast as a lowly serf, the spoiled protagonist has to relearn the basics of getting through a day, from physical labor to plain honesty, stripped of every advantage that made him careless in the first place. The comedy comes from watching someone used to instant results grind through slow, unfamiliar work, while a growing romantic thread pulls him further from the identity he arrived with.
About the cast
Kerem Bürsin plays the wayward heir at the story's center, with Melisa Döngel opposite him. Erkan Kolçak Köstendil, Melis Sezen, Ahmet Mümtaz Taylan, Ecem Özkaya, Cemal Hünal and Güven Kıraç round out the cast, under the direction of Onur Ünlü.
Context & significance
Simarik is a 2024 Turkish adaptation of a Russian film that found a large audience with the same fish-out-of-time premise. Turkish cinema has produced several remakes of foreign comedy hits in recent years, and this one keeps the core structure, a rich man's son forced backward in time as punishment, while resetting the setting, cast and local texture for a Turkish audience. At 111 minutes, it mixes action, romance and comedy in roughly equal measure.
Watching Simarik on Ktime
Simarik can be streamed on K-Time after a free account login, with the film's page itself open to read regardless of login status. For Persian-speaking viewers exploring Turkish comedy and romance titles, K-Time's Farsi interface makes browsing a catalogue built around film like this one considerably easier to navigate.