Haluk Bilginer as Aydin in Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Winter Sleep.

You are an unbearable man, declares Melisa Szen in the third hour of this quietly intense tale of wealth and poverty, religion and politics, husbands and wives from Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan. You are selfish, spiteful and cynical, she continues, before conceding that her target is also an honest, fair, and conscientious man. But sometimes you use these virtues to suffocate people to crush and humiliate them.

The tension between morality and malice is at the heart of Ceylans sprawlingly wordy and cumulatively powerful meditation upon Dostoevskian guilt that credits Chekhov (several stories were initially inspirational), quotes Shakespeare (theres more than a touch of Lear here), acknowledges Sartre (hell is indeed other people) and nods stylistically toward the architectural psychologies of Bergman. The unfashionably expansive dialogue is proudly argumentative and unashamedly literary; these are the kind of conversations one might expect to encounter in a novel or play rather than a film.

Yet for all its oppressive staginess and perversely withheld cinematic pleasures (the eye-catching Cappadocian settings are eschewed for interiors shot by Gkhan Tiryaki in what is best termed widescreen claustrophobia), Winter Sleep is an engrossing work, a finely observed portrait of collapsing social contracts, public and private. While it may not scale the spine-tingling heights of Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, this Cannes Palme dOr winner reconfirms Ceylan as a film-maker at the peak of his powers singular, insightful, compassionate.

Haluk Bilginer is monumental as Aydin, a former actor who proudly declares that he never did soaps (a cheeky nod to Bilginers time on EastEnders?) and who now claims to be working on a significantly unstarted history of Turkish theatre. Much of Aydins time is taken up writing pompous newspaper columns for Voices of the Steppe in which he pontificates about matters of art, morality and religion columns that provoke obsequious fan mail that he duly reads aloud in his bijou hilltop hotel. In his mind, he is an artist and benefactor; in reality, he is a landlord, delegating managerial duties to his long-suffering aide Hidayet (Ayberk Pekcan) and to faceless debt collectors who arent afraid to get tough with the tenants. When the son of one such harassed family throws a stone at Aydins car, it is more than a window that is broken; over the ensuing hours we watch Aydins private life quietly shattering as the facade of his benevolence fractures, falters and falls away.

Ceylan describes Aydin as a very typical modern Turkish intellectual (his name itself is a pointed Turkish pun) and Winter Sleep deftly etches the strange slights of a life that have turned him into someone who hates practically everybody. Ever eager to recall a fleeting encounter with Omar Sharif to his gradually departing guests, Aydin is left in the disconsolate company of his close family; divorced sister Necla (Demet Akbag) whose discussions of not resisting evil veil a tragic desire to return to the husband who wronged her; and trapped wife Nihal (Szen), seeking solace and self-justification in charitable work that is met with fiery disdain. Each is intuitively observed and perfectly played, Ceylan coaxing performancesof extraordinary candour through extended takes that reinforce both the theatricality and naturalism of the piece.

Collaborating on the screenplay (as they have done since 2006s Climates), husband-and-wife team Nuri Bilge and Ebru Ceylan get under the skin of their male and female characters with equal dexterity. Its by arguing about a scene that we make it deeper, the director has said in interview. Were able to see it from both the mans and the womans point of view.

Yet this balance extends beyond gender boundaries; in a drama in which wealth and poverty are juxtaposed as starkly as religion and secularism, the motivations, aspirations and disappointments of every character are described with pointillist precision, tiny details combining to create utterly coherent portraits. Take Hamdi (Serhat Kili), embattled uncle of the young boy who casts the stone, now desperately attempting to reconcile his hot-headed brother and passively threatening landlord, his lips permanently stretched in a grimace of desperation and decency that speaks volumes about his inner anguish.

While the narrative thrust of this story about a landlord at loggerheads with his tenants may be interpreted as political, the devil is in the personal detail of Hamdis smile, Nihals frown, Aydins smirk.

There are moments of pure cinema too; a captured horse, pulled exhausted from a stream, escaping into the glowing night; a lordly hand presented to be kissed, causing a child to collapse in a dead faint; a blanket of white that cleanses and freezes the awe-inspiring landscape and its inhabitants, the wintry sleep of the title implying both hibernation and/or death.

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Winter Sleep review a powerful meditation upon guilt