‘Woman And Child’ review: Saeed Roustaee drama heaps misfortune on an Iranian widow

Dir. Saeed Roustaee. Iran/France 2025. 131mins

The ‘raining stones’ principle of piling up catastrophe after catastrophe has always been a basic of social realism but requires handling with the utmost care, lest it tip over into the realm of melodrama or soap opera. Those are two areas perilously skirted by Iranian feature Woman And Child. Another Cannes Competition entry from writer/director Saeed Roustaee following his 2022 contender Leila’s Brothers, this is a film in which the odds are stacked against women by institutions and an uncaring patriarchy, and in which women must learn to stand together or fall. But the polemical dimension is hamstrung by an ever-mounting chain of ‘now what?’ revelations and abrupt raisings of the ante, leaving it to a strong cast to keep the drama afloat – notably lead actor Parinaz Izadyar.

Subsides into piled-up shocks and reversals

Izadyar – previously seen in Roustaee’s Life And A Day and Just 6.5 – plays Mahnaz, a widowed 45-year-old hospital nurse who is mother to two children, eight-year-old daughter Neda (a lively Arshida Dorostkar) and wayward teenage son Aliyar (Sinan Mohebi). She is also on the verge of remarriage to ambulance driver Hamid (Payman Maadi), who seems genuinely smitten with her but whose smoothie flirtatiousness constitutes an early red flag.

Aliyar is Mahnaz’s main headache – a natural troublemaker, whose precociousness is signalled by his brazenly cheeky amorous approach to his mother’s work colleague. Aliyar’s charismatic mischief at school lands him in trouble with teacher Samkhanian (Maziar Seyedi), whose patience finally runs out when the boy is found running a classroom gambling ring. It involves little more scandalous than betting on a spinning top – Roustaee makes the symbolic most of its vertiginous spirals, shot from above – but it leads to the boy’s expulsion, which then looks like a possible contributory factor to the film’s central tragedy. If this weren’t enough, Roustaee plays an outright telenovela card, with Hamid turning his attentions to Mahnaz’s younger sister Mehri (Soha Niasti).

By this point, the emerging focus is very much the rift in Mahnaz’s family, and the ways in which the callous or underhand behaviour of men undermines female solidarity – represented at the start by an idyllic home schooling session in which Mahnaz and Mehri impart knowledge to the kids, with their mother (Fereshteh Sadr Orafaee) also furthering her own education. But the shocks and confrontations throughout are played very broadly, with Izadyar required to worldessly register diverse shades of horror, upset and fury, or let rip with impassioned lamentations and recriminations. Mahnaz also becomes an avenging fury when she sets out to exact legal redress following the tragedy.

The descent into hyperventilating bathos is all the more disappointing because the film’s first third is so strong, notably in a sequence showing Aliyar at school, specifically in its industrial workshop – an extended sequence staged with grit and detail and crackling with energy, not least in some highly mobile photography. This vividly-delineated milieu brings to mind Truffaut’s 400 Blows, with Aliyar (ebulliently played by Mohebi) reminiscent of that film’s irrepressible Antoine Doinel.

Soon after that, however, the film subsides into piled-up shocks and reversals, leaving the actors to bolster the drama with emoting – not always in the most subtle of ways.  Maadi (from Leila’s Brothers and Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation) makes the most of a sneering bad-egg role by laying on the silky serpentine notes, while Seyedi’s blustering, perpetually aggrieved teacher milks boisterous comic value from an embodiment of abusive authority. And Izadyar is, within the limited parameters the role allows her, compelling even as a schematic icon of female suffering and endurance.