A Hero (2021)

Powerful morality tale - A Hero review by PD

Farhadi's latest perhaps lacks the emotional punch of his best work, but there's still plenty to admire here as he constructs an ethical clusterfuck whilst keeping us rooted in place even as our sympathies fly in every conceivable direction.

The film centres around Rahim (an extraordinary Amir Jadidi) whose every strategy fails at every turn despite his best efforts (although its fair to say there's probably one or two plot twists too many which means the film feels much more contrived than his earlier work). Soon there are other reputations on the line, and possibly other lives as well. Farhadi's flair for stacking rights on top of wrongs until they all topple over into a single mixed-up pile on the floor is again on display here — and what the film lacks in brute force sentiment it makes up for in the childlike simplicity of its central question: What’s the difference between doing a good deed and not doing a bad one? And whilst Farhadi's work doesn't usually tackle the emotional ramifications of social media, here, in his low-key way, he manages to spin Rahim’s diffidence into a shrewd portrait of how random faces in the crowd can sow doubt into someone’s own self-understanding. It's subtle, but always there in the shadows — the flipside of a story about the pitfalls of treating decency as a public spectacle. Iran is a complex and bureaucratic country, but it is also the role of social media and so-called ‘fake news’ that lend the piece a contemporary relevance, even as it feels like an ancient morality tale.

So much of this film’s slow-churning power comes from the growing tension between what people decide about Rahim’s actions second-hand, and how he feels about them himself. The brilliance of Jadidi’s performance isn’t in his soft likeability, but rather in the character’s performance of it; how Rahim both leans into it and pushes against it, and how he then tries to pull himself out from a tailspin of bad decisions even as he keeps making them worse - indeed, it almost feels cruel to see how Rahim is forced into complicity with his own ruin as his possible plans of action become ever narrower. Meanwhile, each new character who’s introduced to the story comes equipped with their own preconceptions, the judgements of which escalate at the same rate as the lies that Rahim — and his roster of collaborators — have to tell in order to undo the damage of the lies they’ve already told. Powerful stuff.