“Ashes” is a slick and sleek Turkish thriller about a woman who falls in love with an unpublished book, a romance based in reality but enveloped in romance novel fantasy.

The latest from filmmaker Erdem Tepegöz (“In the Shadows”) begins with promise, throws in a little sexual heat, and reaches a violent and faintly cryptic climax. But it’s a melodrama that grinds its gears through the middle acts as the dull competes with the far-fetched, muting the story’s impact as it tumbles into boredom.

Gökçe (Funda Eryigit) is a happily-married upper middle-class mother of one, a wife whose publisher husband Kenan (Mehmet Günsür) utterly depends on her evaluations of manuscripts worth publishing as novels.

All is right in Gökçe’s world, save for the occasional botched delivery at her tony Nisantisi (Istanbul) neighborhood boutique. And then she picks up this battered proof with the word “Ashes” (Kül) on the cover.

Narrated in a woman’s voice, it is about a carpenter who “changes the live of people whose path he crosses,” perhaps for the better. Then again, maybe not. The mysterious “M” she writes about, and his mysterious “tower” that opens up the way the narrator sees the city, draws Gökçe in.

Next thing Gökçe knows, she’s tracking down a bakery mentioned in the book. And when that turns out to be a real location in the more hardscrabble Balat district, she starts looking for this “M.”

Lo and behold, she finds a furniture maker who matches the description. “Ali,” he goes by. But his first name is Metin (Alperen Duymaz). He is bearded, sexy and grumpy and apparently in demand. She commissions him to make a mirror for her shop, and that throws them together.

She mentions nothing of the book she is evaluating, and by the time she’s figured out this “tower” and “view,” we realize what Gökçe apparently does not.This guy is catnip, and she’s under his spell and soon will be under and over his sheets, etc.

Tepegöz, working from an Erdi Isik script, visualizes scenes from the faintly purplish prose of the book “Ashes” using a turn-to-ashes/materialize-from-ashes effect to let us see his Gökçe is watching this supposedly fictional book become real via locations and a flesh-and-blood “M.”

But who wrote the book, and what conclusions does the author reach about the irresistible “M?” 

The performances have enough heat to make the chemistry convincing, even if we never get a hint of guilt or fear of discovery from our straying heroine. The revealing wardrobe and cliched violent argument that turns to vigorous sex isn’t enough to make us forget the full life and loving marriage she has thrown over for a case of “fictophilia,” falling in love with a character from a book.

The arguments seem more pre-ordained than impulsive and in-the-moment. Eryigit doesn’t give us much in the way of “conflicted” in this urbane, high-class boutique-owner who tumbles into slumming with a carpenter.

And the movie’s mystery and hint of magical realism are tossed aside in a flurry of prosaic over-explaining that tends to let the ashes, so carefully swirled into the air in the opening act, settle in the most predictably pedestrian places by the finale.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, sex, profanity

Cast: Funda Eryigit, Alperen Duymaz and Mehmet Günsür

Credits: Directed by Erdem Tepegöz, scripted by
Erdi Isik. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:41