Arriving on US screens well over a year after its Golden Bear-winning Berlinale 2020 debut, Mohammad Rasoulof’s There Is No Evil marks another step up for the international profile of Iran’s least-celebrated major auteur. Long concerned with the grave, violent injustices of the Iranian state, Rasoulof presents this four-part anthology feature as perhaps his bluntest yet, a direct, unambiguous attack on the cruelty of a national culture designed, endorsed and executed by a brutal, undemocratic state. It’s also his most ambitious feature yet. Sadly, it’s possibly also his weakest.
The four individual narratives that collectively comprise this two-and-a-half-hour work bear only thematic similarities; their scenarios are unconnected. The first, eponymous chapter, involves a father and husband living out his mundane but comfortable domestic hours between work shifts. Second, “She Said, ‘You Can Do It’” is about a young army conscript living in barracks, trying desperately to negotiate his way out of an impending duty he’s loath to carry out. Third, “Birthday” follows the testy reuniting of lovers ― she approaching her birthday, he on brief leave from the army ― in the wake of a family tragedy. Finally, “Kiss Me” concerns a young German-Iranian woman visiting family friends in rural Iran, an older couple with a secret objective behind their welcome. Rasoulof establishes each of his mini-narratives with a tone of subtly anticipatory calm, set to tumble one way or another off the knife-edge they’re situated upon. His Iran is one bound by suffocating laws, rituals, principles and habits, where even the slightest deviation from the prescribed path could transform a life, or many lives, irrevocably.
That transformation may be for the better or for the worse but it’s always for something — Rasoulof is a closet melodramatist, his sullen urban greys and rustic pastoral landscapes suggesting a kind of modern naturalism he’s only superficially wedded to. There Is No Evil is developed around the central theme of capital punishment, each segment exploring some tangent of the many lives lived in proximity to this heinous practice. Rasoulof’s multi-stranded approach to delineating his argument against the death penalty avoids the pat didacticism that a single narrative approach might have engendered, though none of his individual segments are cultivated at adequate length nor in adequate depth to preclude that didacticism from sullying them, save perhaps the first. He’s got a point to make, and make it he does, yet it’s at the unnecessary cost of nuance, insight and verisimilitude.
Stylistically, the full factory reset of each fade to black and subsequent resumption of a new narrative line allows Rasoulof to explore a greater variety of techniques and genre elements than ever before, which works both in his favor and against it. “She Said, ‘You Can Do It’” is the overtly thriller-esque of the four (though all deal in a certain edgy tension in some regard), essentially converting wholesale to a prison break picture at midpoint; Rasoulof here employs the same flair for establishing mood through manipulation of light, color and physical space as he does throughout “There Is No Evil,” the movie’s most successful segment. Yet, he indulges too much in the genre trappings, dissipating the tension he’s otherwise skilfully built with an overdramatic musical score. Dodgy acting doesn’t aid things either — both middle segments are undone by the amateurish histrionics of their (predictably young, attractive, male) leads, though Rasoulof’s dialogue is often so crude and ponderous it’s a wonder any of his ensemble emerges with their dignity as an actor intact.
The movie is, at least, sincere and uncompromising in its sincerity — if it’s lacking in shades of grey, one wonders what grey tones there even are in an issue as stark as the state killing its own citizens, as the Iranian state does on a chilling scale. Yet it is There Is No Evil’s first, simplest, least preachy installment that has the biggest impact, expressing its political ideas with a cogency that the others confuse with bluntness and it’s also this installment that traffics in a state of suspension right up to its end, suspended among shades of grey that make for much more satisfying viewing than installments two through four’s relative unsubtlety. The casual viewer may be wise to leave it at just that: one strong short and no more. The committed viewer may be compelled to brave the full experience: one strong short and three disappointing ones.
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