[Iranian American screen polymath Payman Maadi (who made such an
impact in films such as Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation) is Samad, a
cop waging an apparently unwinnable war on drugs in the Iranian
capital. Having rounded up a vast community of addicts living and
dying within a hellscape of giant concrete pipes, Samad and his
deputy, Hamid (Houman Kiai), treat their captives like cattle,
stripping and humiliating them, herding them from one overcrowded
prison space to the next.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

LAW OF TEHRAN REVIEW – GRITTY IRANIAN CRIME THRILLER TAKES NO
PRISONERS  
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Mark Kermode
April 2, 2023
The Guardian
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_ Iranian American screen polymath Payman Maadi (who made such an
impact in films such as Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation) is Samad, a
cop waging an apparently unwinnable war on drugs in the Iranian
capital. Having rounded up a vast community of addicts living and
dying within a hellscape of giant concrete pipes, Samad and his
deputy, Hamid (Houman Kiai), treat their captives like cattle,
stripping and humiliating them, herding them from one overcrowded
prison space to the next. _

Law of Tehran, Law of Tehran Film Poster

 

This increasingly nerve-jangling narco policier from _Life and a
Day _writer-director Saeed Roustayi, who has since made the feted
2022 Palme d’Or contender _Leila’s Brothers
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was hailed as Iran’s highest-grossing non-comedic domestic film. Not
that _Law of Tehran _(AKA _Just 6.5_), which won the audience award
at Iran’s Fajr film festival back in 2019, is without a pointedly
nihilistic streak of jet-black humour. For proof, check out the
horrifyingly absurdist opening salvo: a drug bust that turns into a
breakneck, on-foot chase sequence, climaxing in a lethal disappearing
act that combines the vérité grit of _The French Connection
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the physical slapstick of Buster Keaton. Really. It’s a deliberately
bewildering cocktail of brutal tragedy and gallows farce that runs
throughout this very arresting feature.

Playing out amid the human squalor of Tehran’s addiction epidemic,
this festival favourite seems even more urgent now than when it first
opened in Iran four years ago. Iranian American screen polymath Payman
Maadi (who made such an impact in films such as Asghar Farhadi’s _A
Separation
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is Samad, a cop waging an apparently unwinnable war on drugs in the
Iranian capital. Having rounded up a vast community of addicts living
and dying within a hellscape of giant concrete pipes, Samad and his
deputy, Hamid (Houman Kiai), treat their captives like cattle,
stripping and humiliating them, herding them from one overcrowded
prison space to the next.

I struggle to remember a film in which the thin blue line between cops
and criminals is more vividly dramatized.

They are searching for a name – a search that eventually leads them
to Naser Khakzad (Navid Mohammadzadeh), a local kingpin whose
whereabouts are uncovered through means that don’t so much drift
into the murky waters of criminality as dive into them. Such
line-blurring, however, appears to be unremarkable. Indeed, during the
course of the drama, in which evidential drug seizures will be
endlessly misfiled, misreported and misplaced, the roll call of those
handcuffed to the chairs and railings of the police station will
include our key law enforcers, who remain in constant danger of being
thrown into dungeons with the very people they were only recently
interrogating. While many Hollywood thrillers have made great play of
the thin blue line between cops and criminals, I struggle to remember
a film in which that hazy distinction is more vividly dramatised –
in a very literal sense.

From a house where a suspected dealer’s wife and children cower in
terror, to an airport where swathes of human flesh are used to mask
drugs from X-ray machines, there’s nothing glamorous about this
world. The self-destructing Khakzad may be holed up in a swanky
apartment, but he’ll soon find himself fighting for breathing space
among the living dead who are hooked on his products. Yet even as
Roustayi confronts us with the grotesque toll of Khakzad’s trade, so
the film does a nimble two-step that begins to humanise its central
villain just as Maadi’s relentless cop starts to alienate everyone
around him.

Lurking in the background is the omnipresent spectre of the death
penalty, a punishment so severe that it ought to dissuade anyone from
breaking the law. Yet as Samad ruefully observes, the truth is quite
the opposite; no matter how harsh the authorities’ treatment of
dealers and addicts becomes, their numbers continue to soar. Perhaps
the punishment_ is_ the problem? When you’re faced with odds such
as these, what do you have to lose?

Collapsed marriages and lost children litter the plot, increasing the
sense that everything is teetering on the brink of failure. It’s a
credit to Roustayi’s deft storytelling that somehow he manages to
bury this unpalatable pill within the fabric of a gripping drama that
doesn’t preach but merely suggests – leaving it up to the audience
to decide who, if anyone, are the heroes.

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_Law of Tehran_ is in cinemas and on Curzon Home Cinema
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* Film
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* Film Review
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* Law of Tehran
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* Saeed Roustayi
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* Iran
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