Iranian writer-director Vahid Jalilvand delivers a howl of political fury 

Beyond_The_Wall_©Sahab Zaribaf_01_web

Source: Sahab Zaribaf

‘Beyond The Wall’

Dir: Vahid Jalilvand. Iran. 2022. 126 mins.  

Iranian writer-director Vahid Jalilvand issues a genuine howl of political fury in his Venice competition drama Beyond The Wall. Expressions of protest from Iranian cinema are always something to be heeded, especially at this most dangerous time for artists - as witness the current imprisonment of Mohammad Rasoulof and Jafar Panahi, the latter also competing in Venice, in absentia. Beyond The Wall has no lack of either nerve or intensity – you only wish for the control and focus that might have made this claustrophobic quasi-thriller truly effective. Jalilvand won the Orizzonti Award for Best Director in Venice with his second film No Date, No Signature (2017); this this austere yet frenetic follow-up is likely to flourish on the festival circuit (after Venice, it heads to TIFF) althugh it may be more admired than enjoyed. 

A paranoid narrative that, whenever it begins to establish some clarity, tends to jump onto a new level of perplexity            

The first images – the jagged editing is Jalilvand’s own – are of a man, Ali, making a messy, harrowing attempt at suicide in the shower of what appears to be a jail cell. In fact, the setting is then revealed to be his run-down, unwelcoming apartment. Almost entirely blind – following an accident, we soon realise – Ali, played by Navid Mohammadzadeh from No Date…, lives a bleak solitary existence, but receives the occasional visitor. One is Dr Nariman (Amir Aghaee), a brusque but friendly medic who treats his eyes; another, less welcome, is the nosy, intrusive building manager (Danial Kheirikhah) who tries to persuade a taciturnly defiant Ali to join a residents’ meeting.

A furious knocking on the door – and there’s more knocking in this film than in the Porter scene in Macbeth – announces that the hunt is afoot for a young woman on the run from the authorities. It turns out – in a nifty bit of flashback, essentially the narrative being folded back on itself – that the woman, Leila (Diana Habibi), is already sheltering in Ali’s flat. Leila is terrified because she has lost track of her young son, but what crime exactly is she accused of? What are the mysterious letters that Ali keeps receiving? And why is a scowling police inspector (Saeed Dakh) so interested in them? And why does there appear to be a CCTV surveillance camera planted directly above Ali’s doormat?           

All these questions are slyly planted in a paranoid narrative that, whenever it begins to establish some clarity, tends to jump onto a new level of perplexity. Just as the chamber drama, limited to Ali’s murky living quarters, is at its most enclosed, the action moves into the broad daylight, in a flashback showing how Leila got into this mess: attending a workers’ protest over pay, that turned explosive after heavy-handed police methods incited rioting.

What follows sees Leila experiencing one of several epileptic fits she suffers during the action, before she goes on the run to Ali’s apartment block, with its heavily symbolic spiral staircase. There’s something of a spiral structure built in all along, with the action repeatedly looping back to sometimes confusing effect: one scene in the flat plays twice over in two different consecutive versions, while the film plays fast and loose with both time and space, Ali’s flat proving altogether unmappable even if you really pay close attention to its layout.            

The twist, when it eventually comes, is ingenious, if contrived: suffice to say, it establishes the film as being as much metaphysical as political, an existential riddler as much as a surveillance-state thriller. But it’s a pity that this dramatically overdrawn film takes so long getting to the point, essentially squandering its narrative tension once the initial suspenseful situation is established. The acting doesn’t always serve the drama, either: for much of the time, Mohammadzadeh maintains a glum muted monotone while Habibi cranks up to a frenzied pitch of nerved-up agitation. And there’s some overstatement that misfires: not least the overinsistent use of repetitive sound effects to bump up the anxiety level. 

Some of the action is striking, though. The protest and the heavy-handed police reprisals are nothing if not dynamically staged and cut, and quite startling in the context of Iranian drama. Also venturing into taboo areas in this respect are the initial suicide attempt and the febrile intimacy that grows between the male and female leads, although they’re not that often seen in the same shot. But the visuals can also be too airlessly oppressive, with Adib Sobhani’s photography cloaking the apartment in stone-grey tones by day, heavy subaquatic green by night. The imposing final shot couldn’t make it clearer what the film is really about, but you wish that Jalilvand had employed a little of the conciseness and direct methods of the true agitprop artist, and tempered the agonised longueurs of the film’s more poetic psychodrama dimension. 

Production company: Ali Jalilvand

International sales: The Match Factory, info@matchfactory.de

Producer: Ali Jalilvand

Screenplay: Vahid Jalilvand

Cinematography: Adib Sobhani

Production design: Keyvan Moghaddam

Editing: Vahid Jalilvand

Main cast: Navid Mohammadzadeh, Diana Habibi, Amir Aghaee, Saeed Dakh