DRAMA; 1hr 44min (Persian and Azerbaijani with subtitles)
STARRING: Vahid Mobasseri, Mariam Afshari, Ebrahim Azizi, Hadis Pakbaten, Mohammed Ali Elyasmehr
Van life: Mobasseri and passenger
Retribution uncoils, snake-like, in a road trip to a dark night of the soul from writer-director Jafar Panahi (The Circle). After mechanic Vahid (Mobasseri) believes he recognises the distinctive walk of a man with a prosthetic leg who tortured him in an Iranian prison (Azizi as Eghbal), his reaction is to kidnap the monster and bury him alive. When his frantic captive denies everything, claiming the loss of his leg is recent, an uncertain Vahid is faced with two equally unappealing options: to either go ahead with the extraction of an eye for an eye, or to consult with fellow former political prisoners to determine who the man truly is.
This is no snap decision, given that Vahid and his fellow sufferers — photographer Shiva (Mobasseri), bride-to-be Goli (Pakbaten) and hothead Hamid (Elyasmehr) — were blindfolded while being tortured and are now divided in their reactions. But assuming their hostage, currently languishing sedated and unconscious in the back of Vahid’s van, is in fact Eghbal, how can they possibly consider allowing him to live, especially after what Vahid has just put him through?
Complicating their bleakly impossible bind, the comatose man’s young daughter (Deinaz Najafi) calls his cellphone in a panic when her heavily pregnant mother (Afssaneh Najmabadi) passes out, leaving his captors with no ethical course of action but to pick the two of them up and drive the mother to a hospital. Her delivery of a baby boy would doubtless have been a far bigger deal if her husband hadn’t been drugged into a stupor at the time. As it is, there are no tidy resolutions in the course of Panahi’s gruelling, Palme d’Or–awarded descent into a quagmire of cause and effect. The aftermath of torture knows no expiration date and the scars inflicted on its victims are carved for all time into their psyches.
