#No Date No Signature

[whileiamdying]

‘Beyond the Wall’ Review: A Grueling Guided Tour of an Iranian Police-State Nightmare

A suicidal blind man and an epileptic fugitive mother become physically and psychologically trapped in Vahid Jalilvand's bruisingly assaultive polemic against Iranian state oppression.

By Jessica Kiang Sep 8, 2022 11:31am PT

Nobody emerges unscathed — least of all the audience — from Vahid Jalilvand‘s highly effective, deeply unpleasant “Beyond the Wall,” a morbidly violent allegory for the effects of state-sponsored trauma on the individual that places contemporary Iranian society somewhere on the map between the sixth and seventh circles of hell. A strange combination of intricate, almost sci-fi-inflected psychological thriller, splenetic social-breakdown broadside and two-hander (torture) chamber drama, it is an exercise in bravura filmmaking applied to a story so relentlessly grim you might wish it were a little less well-made, giving you an excuse to look away. In his 2017 film “No Date No Signature” (which won Best Director and Best Actor in Venice’s Horizons sidebar), Jalilvand pictured a stratified society teetering on the edge of legality and morality; here, however, it has toppled entirely into the abyss. The only way is down, and the filmmaker is bringing you with it.

These uncompromising intentions are signalled by an opening salvo that would surely be any other film’s brutalizing emotional nadir, as we’re introduced to Ali (“No Date, No Signature” star Navid Mohammadzadeh) in the commission of an attempted suicide. No mere “cry for help,” it is not just the act itself but the manner he has chosen that is shocking: In the dripping damp of a dingy bathroom, Ali wraps a soaking T-shirt around his head, ties a plastic bag over that and shoves his battered hands down behind the shower pipe, effectively cuffing his own arms behind him while he screams and suffocates. The scene is such a trial to witness, it’s possible to miss the brief, disorienting, semi-subliminal inserts where it appears the violence is being done to him by someone else — or to think you have imagined them. 

It is only an insistent pounding on his front door that brings Ali back from the brink. Breaking the pipe and tearing off his plastic shroud, he shuffles, gasping, dripping, broken, to answer it. The men at the door inform him that a woman wanted for a heinous crime has fled custody and was last spotted on the fire escape of his forbiddingly enormous apartment building. They suspect him — for some reason more than all the other residents — of harboring her. Ali shoos the men away, but we know that the woman, Leila (Diana Habibi), has indeed infiltrated his home and is cowering beneath a countertop, hands clasped over her bleeding, chapped lips to stifle her sobs. Ali has not seen her, because he does not see anything much. His failing eyesight is not just a temporary symptom of his recent near-death encounter, but a condition brought on from an earlier trauma, and it is degenerating faster than it should, as Ali refuses to use the treatments prescribed by sympathetic doctor Nariman (Amir Aghaee) on his frequent house calls. 

It takes a painfully long time — and rather too many sequences of Ali feeling his way down his apartment’s yeasty, peeling walls, lighting cigarettes with palsied hands and peering at a mysterious letter he’s received — but eventually, as must happen, Ali discovers Leila. She is, and remains, terrified throughout but in Ali she has lucked upon the one man in this whole building (perhaps even the one man in all of Iran) who wants, obscurely, to help her. It might be because, given his initial state, he has little to lose. But perhaps it is something else, something like a shot at redemption for the unknown sins of a past that more frequently forces itself into the present as Ali and Leila’s predicament worsens.

It takes a painfully long time — and rather too many sequences of Ali feeling his way down his apartment’s yeasty, peeling walls, lighting cigarettes with palsied hands and peering at a mysterious letter he’s received — but eventually, as must happen, Ali discovers Leila. She is, and remains, terrified throughout but in Ali she has lucked upon the one man in this whole building (perhaps even the one man in all of Iran) who wants, obscurely, to help her. It might be because, given his initial state, he has little to lose. But perhaps it is something else, something like a shot at redemption for the unknown sins of a past that more frequently forces itself into the present as Ali and Leila’s predicament worsens.

The tricksiness of the finale, however, does somewhat undercut the seriousness of the film’s more intriguing ideas about how a prison made of concrete can never so comprehensively constrain us as the prisons of the body and the mind. Ali’s failing eyesight, his nerve-damaged hands, his stooped posture and proliferating scars, as well as Leila’s epilepsy and her son’s muteness, can be read as a fleshy physiological allegory for state violence and oppression, as damage to the body social manifesting in damage to actual bodies. But the metaphor only really works up to the point when Jalilvand’s overly complicated plotting comes round on itself. In any case, after more than two hours of seizures, crashes, riots, shootouts, beatings, and endlessly relived trauma, some of the finer points of the movie’s philosophy may escape you, just as you, too, are longing for escape.  

[housederiva]

The first woman I ever fell in love with should at least have a tarot card if she's not going to be in Veilguard

here's bethany

Edit!!! I’ve never been more happy to be wrong

[lintuja]

2017, no date no signature, vahid jalilvand, iran.

[nobleriver]

Doctor Who Season 7 Minisodes

Rain Gods

[alcoholicweiwuxian]

bestiessssss <3

click for better quality; tumblr eats lines

[thebxghag]

An older Tea Shop Au doodle that I still like -- kind of the spiritual successor to this one.

in case it's not readable, Iroh is saying: "Oh, Lala! There you are; your mother is looking for you"

[lukashaa]

On-model Danyas

[vellichorsdesire]

going on a date with an f/o and your platonic f/o(s) are hiding behind a newspaper/bush in the most gooofiest disguises ever. do you or your f/o notice? do they follow you around and get busted? or do you shake them off eventually and get a memorable moment with that f/o

[weabooii]

New AIBOXES by GreatGRIN! Order today at Azamon.com 👍

[northernember]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO THE BESTEST BOY,

CAL!!!!

Im so sad I wasnt able to finish the piece I was drawing for this day, alas I was fighting for my life

so have this old drawing I never uploaded of the birthday boy

[cyberkaban]

Dr.Easterman lore or something

Oh no evil psychosis-skeleton with red glowing eyes, whatdoido😫😭💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀

[treeofnonsense]

"Corona can’t remember a single dance where Jody was able to look at her at all ... But here, she’s damp from sweat and the clammy air, she’s wearing a singlet from the clearance rack and her hair has been downright abominable as of late, so of course Jody is taking her in like she’ll die if she looks away, like it’s the last time she’ll ever get to see her."

Fanart of one of my favorite scenes from @lumentears's fanfic at the end of the world, but not before. By far my favorite Jodybeth fic I've ever read, so here is my tribute.

[pecoraisa-archive]

appwl yum

[release-the-sheep]

I really like golden moles

[gummy-axolotl]

Drawing my F/O's as Worms-On-A-String Part 7: Hitoshi Shinso (My Hero Academia)

[tri-punisher]

two of chapel's favourite dogs and one he wishes he could put down