Anticipation.
Defying a 20-year filmmaking ban, the Iranian auteur made his seventh feature in secret.
Enjoyment.
Potent and unsettling shorts portrayed with meandering pace.
In Retrospect.
The film’s political importance is explored with a sincerity that outweighs it shortcomings.
Unfolding across four divergent stories, Mohammad Rasoulof’s Golden Bear-winning anthology film There is No Evil presents a potent tapestry of perspectives informed by capital punishment in present-day Iran. Rather than being caught between poetry and censorship, Rasoulof strays from the stronghold of allegorical aesthetics and instead adopts a necessary and uncompromising antagonism against governmental oppression with fearless narrative urgency.
Each short is emotionally draining in its portrayal of the personal responsibility of executioners against a backdrop of authoritarian rule. Depictions of complex family dynamics, mandatory military conscription and corrupt state practices work in tandem to create a textured understanding of violence and its banality, of its immersion in the quotidian and the mundane.
Get more Little White Lies
The first two vignettes are captivating and thrilling, making the chest tighten with anxiety, while the didactic dialogue of the third and fourth shorts falter in focus and tonally complicate the whole. Despite an excessive 150-minute runtime, a fair share of abrupt tonal shifts and a somewhat heavy-handed execution of metaphors threatening to rob the anthology of power and cohesion, the dramatically consistent depictions of contempt, grief and rage bring an adequate sense of uniformity.
