Iran is a prison and everybody is inside: cons and non-cons; parents and their children. That’s the message hammered home, never subtly but with terrific force and conviction, throughout the course of Mohsen Gharaei’s hothouse domestic drama, which plays in the Orizzonti section in Venice. It’s about a low-level jailer, crushed by life, who returns from the day job and proceeds to incarcerate his own family. He does so out of love and to reassert his authority, to protect his wife and kids from the world and from their own foolish notions. For him, it’s a bone-headed busman’s holiday. For his family, it’s a nightmarish tragicomic staycation.
Veteran Iranian actor Farhad Aslani is perfectly cast as Rashid Hafizhi, Gharaei’s misguided prison guard. Rashid is a burly bear of a man who nonetheless carries an air of bewilderment and defeat, as though he’s smart enough to know that everyone in the vicinity is just that little bit smarter than him. He’s been falsely accused of aiding and abetting a jailbreak and is facing imminent eviction from his rented family home. Then, just when it seems his day can’t get any worse, Rashid learns that his cherished eldest daughter, Ensi (Laleh Marzban), is planning to run off to seek work as a model in Turkey. Modelling in Iran is a non-starter, she explains. Ensi has to cover her arms and neck for each job, while the power supply is so unstable and the lights have a tendency to cut out in the middle of a photoshoot.
Gharaei’s previous picture, Without Everything, was a major box office hit in Iran in 2021, and was lavished with awards at the Fajr film festival in Tehran. This one looks set for a rather rockier reception, assuming it is permitted to land safely at all. It’s an angry, cornered beast of a movie, a rugged piece of old-school social realism and a thinly veiled parable of life in the Islamic Republic. Escape, it suggests, is the only reasonable option. But for that one needs money, a passport and a key to open the door.
One fears for the inhabitants of Falling House. Outside the Hafizhi family home, bulldozers are raking the earth to prepare for a new housing estate. Inside, the jailer has become a one-man wrecking ball, goaded into a fury by the sight of Ensi’s modelling portfolio and doubling down at every turn. First Ensi is imprisoned; then his wife, Zitab (Rina Raminfar); finally his plucky youngest daughter. “This is my prison,” he says. “And I make the rules.”
Some of the dialogue is perhaps a little on the nose. “Rashid, I know you’re in a bad place,” wails Zitab just as the house goes into lockdown. “How unlucky are we?” says Ensi a little later. “The people coming to demolish our house are our only hope.” Or wait, might these lines in fact be intentional jokes, judiciously deployed to lighten the glowering mood? Falling House spins an anguished, brutal tale, but it could play just as well as an absurdist black comedy and Gharaei leaves the door ajar for an alternative parallel reading. He whips up a robust, potent, powerfully acted affair, a film that’s altogether more sturdy than the Hafizhis’ frail house on the landfill. Sturdier, too, than the broken family inside.
• Falling House screened at the Venice film festival.
Veteran Iranian actor Farhad Aslani is perfectly cast as Rashid Hafizhi, Gharaei’s misguided prison guard. Rashid is a burly bear of a man who nonetheless carries an air of bewilderment and defeat, as though he’s smart enough to know that everyone in the vicinity is just that little bit smarter than him. He’s been falsely accused of aiding and abetting a jailbreak and is facing imminent eviction from his rented family home. Then, just when it seems his day can’t get any worse, Rashid learns that his cherished eldest daughter, Ensi (Laleh Marzban), is planning to run off to seek work as a model in Turkey. Modelling in Iran is a non-starter, she explains. Ensi has to cover her arms and neck for each job, while the power supply is so unstable and the lights have a tendency to cut out in the middle of a photoshoot.
This report is published with credit to theguardian.com. Full available text from the wire is above. Read on theguardian.com →
Source: theguardian.com · Xan Brooks. Published 3 Sept 2026, 12:15 pm.
