Metacritic-Rezensionen

Terrestrial Verses, one of the most brilliant and provocative films to emerge from Iran recently, has qualities that link it to both the modernist formal traditions of post-1979 Iranian cinema and the more recent trend of social and political asperities aimed at the authoritarian repressiveness of the Islamic Republic.

Terrestrial Verses is a marvel of potent understatement.

Each small humiliation, taken alone, will raise your blood pressure a little. But put them all together, and more seismic reverberations may finally rattle a society to its core.

This film is as muted in its approach to character and drama as its color palette, but the result is devastating.

Though the structure of the vignettes can grow repetitive as the film moves along to a scene nearly identical to the one that came before, Terrestrial Verses never falters in challenging traditional notions while simultaneously providing a glimmer of hope.

This is punchy first-person filmmaking, from the point of view of the last person you want to be.

It is a modest, methodical movie-in-vignettes that demonstrates the far-reaching, constrictive force of Iran’s regime and the society it has created. It is also a canny representation of the kind of straight-faced authoritarian illogic that creates its own delusional reality, which is then forced upon a people.

Through their concentrated and pared-down survey of institutional power, Asgari and Khatami show foremost how no behavior and social practice is spared the state’s gaze, and personal autonomy––especially for those outside the elites––remains only a myth.

While there is no doubting the filmmakers’ admirably humanistic and progressive intentions, however, the picture itself somehow ends up less than the sum of its often-impressive parts.

The sense of repetition that the film leans into in order to acknowledge the inescapable grip of the state is as much a feature as it is a bug.