‘Mortician’ review: Sensitive, slowburn drama follows two Iranian exiles in Canada

Dir. Abdolreza Kahani. Canada. 2025. 94mins.

Snowbound exteriors and coolly detached execution belie the heat of the political anger fuelling Mortician, a Canada-set drama by Iranian writer/director Abdolreza Kahani (Nina, A Shrine). Essentially a two-hander with a few supporting characters, this sparse, measured piece, which premieres at Edinburgh International Film Festival, is about exiles affected by the long reach of Iran’s regime. The film is a slowburner that, while succinct, does not entirely sustain its momentum. But, coming in the wake of Jafar Panahi’s Palme d’Or winner It Was Just An Accident – also a protest against abuses of power in Iran – there should be interest in a film that presents that same oppression reaching around the world. 

Shows a trenchant edge in evoking the darkest aspects of exile

Nima Sadr (seen last year in Kahani’s A Shrine) plays Mojtaba, a lugubrious and taciturn bear of a man living and working in Canada, a specialist in washing corpses before burial, following Islamic tradition. The company he works for is about to shut down, and his boss (Mehdi Salar) advises him to return to Iran. While pondering his future, Mojtaba is summoned by Jana, an exiled Iranian singer in hiding in the countryside. A dissident whose protest songs have made her a target of the Iranian authorities, Jana (played by real-life singer Golazin Ardestani, aka Gola) tells Mojtaba that she wants him to wash her body when she dies; although a dedicated lover of life, she plans to kill herself as a protest, after filming videos for her followers. 

Mojtaba is anxious to keep earning money for his family back in Iran, so agrees to work with Jana, even if some of her ideas – such as filming herself naked to maximise her protest – clash with his pious principles. But, in a touch of the film’s characteristic dry irony, he admits that he is observant only because it is expected of his job – something that comes across not as cynicism, but as a token of the character’s dutiful passivity. 

Much of the action occurs at Jana’s country hideout, where the emotionally demonstrative singer works an irresistible charm on Mojtaba, to the point that the film almost becomes an oblique platonic romance. The sequences with Jana are offset nicely by Mojtaba’s encounters with other characters, including Kimia (Kimia Motevalli), a worldly young woman whose mother wishes that some of the virtue of Mojtaba’s dead could rub off on the girl.

But mostly the film functions as a duet, with Mojtaba’s gentle solemnity pitched against the fire of Gola’s mercurial Jana – whose songs and other musical activities, including play with percussive bowls, brings the film a further level of expressiveness (Gola contributes the music, together with Schubert Avakian). There is, however, something of an imbalance in the characterisation. While Mojtaba emerges strongly from what is learnt of his back story, Jana never takes on quite the same substance, the character remaining more of an idea despite Gola’s performance; vivid though perhaps over-conscious of its impish charisma. Yet a dramatic light touch – notwithstanding a somewhat jarringly tearful crescendo to the duo’s emotional journey – is sustained up to the final dark turn of events, which comes across as inevitable but still surprising.

Instead of end credits, the film concludes in a sort of afterword, thanking key collaborators and outlining Kahani’s DIY method: he prides himself on filming solo, armed with only a phone and a microphone. As seen in Mortician, the result is not merely professional but elegantly crafted, the cleanly framed images displaying a clarity that make the most of a reduced palette – the snow outside mirrored in the light, uncluttered interiors of Jana’s home. The editing too is distinctive: a slowburn feel even while individual sequences and shots roll by briskly rather than abruptly. 

The film shows a trenchant edge in evoking the darkest aspects of exile, especially for those who face punitive reprisals. Gola’s own real-life experience of surveillance and threat are one source of inspiration for a film that starts out subtly troubling, then hits harder once we come to realise the ultimate stakes of the drama.