Living Twice, Dying Thrice – first-look review

Surely the first Iranian film to feature on its soundtrack ​‘Darkest Light’ by Lafayette Afro Rock Band – aka the saxophone sample from Wreckx-N-Effect’s ​‘Rump Shaker’ – Living Twice, Dying Thrice is full of surprises. 

Writer-director Karim Lakzadeh begins with an elegant premise: The movie opens in the immediate aftermath of a mining disaster, as Ibrahim and Davoud claw their way through an opening in the mountainside, pushing loose rocks out of the way like penny-ante Sisyphuses, collapsing on the ground and sucking in fresh air. A leafless tree comes gradually into focus as their eyes adjust to the light. A third miner, Younes, remains inside, injured and immobilized. But rather than seek help, Ibrahim and Davoud have an idea: Davoud has survived a previous collapse at another mine, and remembers that while the survivors received a token bonus and a week’s leave, the families of the miners who died were compensated with life-changing payouts.

Worth more dead than alive, Ibrahim and Davoud agree to sneak home and send their families to claim the blood money. They’ll lay low and keep each other’s secret; each will tell their relatives that they’re the only survivor. Younes, who is younger and has no immediate family, will have to stay behind for now; if a rescue crew comes, he’s to say he witnessed their deaths, otherwise they’ll come back for him when it’s dark out, and let him in on the scheme.

As Ibrahim and Davoud make their way down the mountain, wandering across rocky, barren expanses through cold rain and choking fog, trying to catch a ride, the bleak setting seems to mirror their state of limbo. Lakzadeh shot clandestinely, with a small crew and evidently a small camera. A short focal length lends close-ups a slight distortion; the actors’ faces, matted with sweat and dust, match a desaturated palette. The images have a banal intimacy. The purgatorial hillsides are a stripped-down symbolic landscape familiar from Iranian films like Sohrah Shahid-Saless’s classic Still Life or Mohammad Rasoulof’s Iron Island; as inevitable complications rise in the hastily conceived plan, Lakzadeh also teases out a potential thriller about ordinary people whose heads get turned by the prospect of free money, only to face sickening moral compromises and the domino-effect consequences of in-the-moment miscalculations, like A Simple Plan or No Country for Old Men.

Living Twice, Dying Thrice retains elements of both allegory and neo-noir, but before the end of the film’s first act, it becomes clear that Lakzadeh’s approach is much more freewheeling and eccentric. Characters are introduced with mysterious, deadpan flourishes: a clairvoyant hermit who can’t start a fire; a fainting woman; a be-roped reaper, darting through the background wielding a scythe like a stalking killer in a slasher film, who turns out to be Davoud’s sister Zizi, a horror live-streamer with a GoPro affixed to her hijab. The tone shifts impulsively, scene by scene, as musical interludes – a karaōke cover of Joe Dassin; an underground rock band’s instrumental ABBA cover – broaden the expressive scope of the material, which Lakzadeh also stages digressively. One key conversation is interrupted by the street cats fighting in the foreground of the shot. There are sight gags, droll one-liners, and quirky characters seeded in the background; if this approach sometimes saps the story of its momentum, it provides plenty of interest in compensation.

The action takes the characters up and down the mine, in and out of town, ultimately to a surreal house party in one of the wealthier precincts of Tehran; the miners retain a jaggy free-floating desperation throughout their pursuit of a reward that remains tantalizingly out of reach. Quite the shaggy-dog story, Living Twice, Dying Thrice is a fable about hapless workers discovering that not even the afterlife is all it’s cracked up to be.