Director: Hannah Marks
Hannah Marks directs this 2024 coming-of-age drama about a teenager whose OCD colors every step of a mystery involving a missing billionaire.
What is Turtles All the Way Down about?
Aza Holmes spends her days managing invasive, looping thoughts while trying to hold onto a normal high-school life, and the story never treats that struggle as background noise — it's woven into how she experiences everything else. When a reward is offered for information on a fugitive billionaire who vanished before facing fraud charges, Aza's oldest friend pulls her into the search, partly for the money and partly to reconnect with the billionaire's son, a childhood acquaintance. Turtles All the Way Down follows Aza as she tries to balance a budding relationship, a fraying friendship, and a genuine investigative thread, all while her intrusive thoughts threaten to derail any sense of control she manages to build. Isabela Merced carries the film's internal perspective, and the mystery plot stays secondary to the more personal question of how someone learns to live inside an unpredictable mind.
Cast & crew
Isabela Merced plays Aza, the film's anxious, sharply observant narrator, opposite Cree Cicchino as her best friend and confidante. Felix Mallard appears as the billionaire's son and Aza's love interest, while Judy Reyes plays Aza's mother and J. Smith-Cameron and Poorna Jagannathan fill out the adult roles surrounding the central mystery.
Context & significance
The film adapts John Green's novel of the same name, following his string of young-adult book-to-screen adaptations, but distinguishes itself by centering a protagonist's OCD as the emotional core rather than a subplot. Director Hannah Marks brings a restrained, character-first approach that keeps the missing-billionaire plot from overwhelming the more intimate story about friendship and mental health.
Where & how to watch
Turtles All the Way Down is available on K-Time with Farsi subtitles and a Persian dub, presented through an interface built for Persian-speaking audiences. Streaming it requires only a free K-Time account; the film's page can be browsed and read without signing in first.