Fish & Cat

Fish and Cat was recently screened in Iran as part of what is called the "Art and Experience" movement, wherein independent films receive limited screening and all box- office revenue is given to the director and producers in support of such films.

I had personally followed news on Fish and Cat ever since its recognition at the Venice film festival. The movie is advertised as a slasher, and I guess that's what gets audiences all excited about the film in the first place: a number of guys running a restaurant in the north of Iran allegedly serve human meat to their customers (not the most usual theme for an Iranian film) but the movie is far more complex and layered than this simple hook would suggest.

Apart from the seemingly-impossible feat of recording a 2-hour-long movie in one take (I can only imagine how the crew felt after someone made a mistake -- and I assume there must have been at least a few), the cyclical nature of time, the recurrence of events, the eerie voice overs, the sudden shifts in tone and the elements of horror planted here and there made Fish and Cat into a cinematic treat.

Director Shahram Mokri obviously does not expect his audience to make sense of it all. Rather, he wants you to get lost in the borderlands of dream and reality, and he achieves this quite brilliantly. In fact, during the first few loops in time, I found myself trying to figure out what had just happened and at which point in the overall storyline the iterations were taking place; but after the loops occurred increasingly more often half-way through the film, I simply gave up and just waited to see where the film would take me next.

The movie can be viewed as a series of short films wrung together through the story of the restaurant and its ominous cooks, and in spite of the dissimilar themes (coincidence, loss, love, etc.), the overall product is a surprisingly coherent narrative and a successful feature-length film.

Strongly recommended. If you are looking for a meaningful full movie full of symbols, this is the one.

Just to balance all the other over-enthusiastic reviews:

It is indeed a very well made feature, with some very clever cinematographic ideas, however it gives a two hours of very mundane viewing experience, of a couple of guys walking around the forest, having a very non-interesting conversations or sometimes telling fantastic stories, without their merit, deeper meaning or literary qualities being apparent to me. It was interesting to see Iran's modern middle-class youth, which rarely is a subject of Iranian films. However there was no character development, any kind of psychological or social commentary. One spends most of time trying to piece together the meaning of conversations that are just part of their lives, and to figure out if some point was intended by the director in any given scene, or not?

We were utterly bored, staying in the cinema only to see how the director could solve the end. The end scene is truly beautiful though!

This is an attempt to create a clumsy copy that the director couldn't made, anything used in this movie such as storyline, scripts, directing, filming, and other stuff are very clumsy, primitive and used in the wrong place and without a purpose, so if you want to waste your more than a 2 hours of your time I highly recommend you to watch it.

well this movie was a complete waste of time. i don't know why it had been given so many prizes intentionally? It's boring as hell and it's not even like a horror movie.there were so much buzz about this movie that i was excited to watch it but i was bored 10 minutes in. It seems the director wanted to make a horror movie but failed to do so.it's a big problem in Iranian cinema. the directors just don't know how to make a good horror movie like Hollywood does.just following the people with a camera and blurting out nonsense dialogues won't make a movie good enough to watch.this movie didn't even followed a certain rule.it was like you are following a bunch of clueless people going around. Don't waste your time. go and watch something else.