Shot in secret and smuggled out of Iran in 2019,Mohammad Rasoulof’s “There is No Evil” is comprised of four short stories about men connected to the death penalty. Why was Rasoulof’s film snuck out of the country and sent to the Berlin Film Festival, where it won the top prize in 2020? The answer lies in Rasoulof’s anthology being subtly critical of its home country’s horrid usage of capital punishment.
The first story told has government worker Heshmet with a yapping wife and bratty daughter, who also goes out of his way to care for his ailing mother-in-law, and, gosh, save trapped kittens, turning out to be not what we expect (I won’t say more). The second vignette, and the strongest of the four, has six young soldiers in a grimy military cell arguing over the agonizing decision facing one of them: to execute a prisoner by hanging or refuse and reap the consequences. The tension is palpable, Its twists keep joy hanging and recall that of a finely tuned thriller directed by ‘50s B-movie master Sam Fuller. The third story has a soldier, on a three-day leave, visiting his girlfriend in the country but struggling to face his past actions. Finally, the fourth and weakest tale has an elderly father struggling to tell his niece of a harrowing secret he’s kept for decades.
Clocking in at a whopping two-and-a-half-hour running time (too long), Rasoulof’s film has its sheer moments of transcendence, especially in the first two stories, but could have been bettered by dropping one of the weaker tales. Unsurprisingly, “There is no Evil” is not only banned in Iran, but Rasoulof himself was sentenced to prison last year due to his films constituting “subversive propaganda.” Regardless of its flaws, the film is a testament to art’s power to freely express.
SCORE: B