From Turkish comedian Cem Yilmaz, Do Not Disturb feels like it was meant to be a wholesome slice-of-life comedy-drama where a hotel manager has meaningful interactions with his fellow co-workers and his guests at night. It’s not quite like the Grand Budapest Hotel, though the film shares its fondness of bright, vivid colors and old-style aesthetics. As the film deals with a character hoping for a new start post-pandemic, there is something here about loneliness and coping mechanisms, as Ayzek relies on an Instagram influencer for all his life wisdom. However, the film makes it hard to make it care about its characters, as everyone but the main character seem one dimensional. When the film makes a surprising shift two-thirds of the way through, it feels like it came by too late.

When a film’s world is similar to ours, the film has to make the story stand out through its characters. Whether the film does so by focusing on their relationships, or by their unique perspective of the ordinary world, the film has to make us care about the characters. We have to know them as if they were our friends, so that the audience would want to see them succeed, or at least empathize when they lose. Unfortunately, other than the main character, everyone else around Ayzek feels so surface-level. Instead of a wholesome ensemble with their own personalities to root, each character feels like they’ve only been written so that certain audience groups could project on them.