Five sisters in Turkey deal with their lives being upended by conservative family members.
There are multiple different protagonists throughout Mustangs, as this is a movie that follows the lives of five young sisters who are forced to live in the Turkish countryside with their uncle, Erol, and grandmother. Their parents have died, leaving them in the care of the only living family members left in their lives.
At the beginning of the movie, they’re playing on the beach with a group of boys, and end up sitting on their shoulders to continue their play. These are things that normal young girls do, even if some of them are teenagers, but when they walk home, their grandmother is abolutely furious with them.
She thinks it is sinful for them to rub their lady parts on these boy’s shoulders, calling it basically the work of the devil.
The girls clearly were just playing with the boys, but when their uncle finds out about what happened, he is completely and utterly furious at how they ended up defiling themselves with these random men. This is the beginning of the end for the sisters, as they are banned from leaving the home and no longer can attend school.
Their grandmother begins to prepare to marry them off one by one, starting with the eldest. The oldest sister escapes every so often to meet with the boy she is in love with, but all of the sisters are subject to learn traditional skills for women in order to prepare them for their futures as wives.
Things escalate to all new levels when the sisters escape one day and attend a football match, which their grandmother and the women of the house see on television, cutting off the town’s electricity before any of the men can see. That’s when the marriage operations start to get serious.
We start with the two oldest sisters. The eldest is married to her lover, while the other is in an arranged marriage she is not happy with. The other sister, Selma, is then tested by her new in-laws after she doesn’t bleed on the sheets—they think she is impure.
The truth here is that their uncle was sexually assaulting some of the sisters throughout the movie, and she is one of the unlucky ones. The next sister is prepared for marriage, and she begins acting completely recklessly. After having sex with a boy in the car, she shoots herself while the family is sitting at the lunch table.
That leaves the final two sisters. The youngest is begging a local man to teach her how to drive, as she already is planning her escape.
The night of the second youngest’s wedding, the two hatch their great escape plan, and run all the way to Istanbul, where their former schoolteacher lives. The movie ends with them at her front door and her shock when she sees these two little girls at her step.