Review: Wistful and Eerie in Equal Measure, Hit the Road Is Also Cagey to a Fault

Writer-director Panah Panahi’s Hit the Road traces a road trip that a family takes across a rugged Iranian landscape in their SUV. Inside the car sits a father (Hassan Madjooni) with a leg in plaster, his stoic wife (Pantea Panahiha), an older son who says nothing (Amin Simiar), and a rambunctious younger one (Rayan Sarlak). Then there’s the family dog, who also has an injured leg and is the only character here whose name we learn. We remain in the dark about the exact destination of this family’s trip, but the sensations that Panahi whips up, from humor to tension, from mystery to grief, are crystal clear.

Iranian cinema’s allure often stems from the deceptive simplicity of its elements. The car is often the literal vehicle that stitches the films’ bare bones together around a melancholy core. The choice of the automobile purposefully limits the mise-en-scène and narrative possibilities to a parabolic austerity. We see more of a situation that zigzags than a narrative that moves traditionally forward. Whether characters are headed to a place of special importance (Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry) or just aimlessly driving around as if in search of idiosyncratic encounters (Jafar Panahi’s Taxi), what matters most is the ride itself. Most specifically, the conversations and metaphors that a small moving cocoon of a space can render possible.

Jafar Panahi’s son and Kiarostami’s former assistant, Panah Panahi taps into this trope but chooses one too many directions to follow. Without the constancy of melancholy, not much clicks into a coherent whole. At first Hit the Road seems like a hokey comedy about family relations, particularly the infectious wildness of children, who are capable of turning any situation into a dramatic or playful event. The characters yell and mock each other jokingly inside the car, and sometimes break into a joyful karaoke number. Later, obstacles get in the way and they’re forced to make several stops (for cigarettes or to go sheepskin shopping), which allows Panahi to switch genre gears, or affectations, such as segueing from slapstick to the easily recognizable iconography of Iranian art cinema’s lyrical slowness.

When the family car stops, Panahi goes looking for beauty wherever he can find it, overtly aestheticizing the vistas, as if trying to milk cinematographic value out of the few instances when the characters aren’t huddled together in a tiny space. Some of these moments are beautiful, such as the various extreme long shots and a surreal interlude where the father lays on the ground in a foil sleeping bag with his young son on top and they’re transported into outer space. But the scenes feel untethered from any kind of captivating narrative purpose.

Hit the Road gradually gains an eerie aura as the characters continue to hint at the point of their destination with the evasiveness of criminals who fear that their vehicle is bugged. There’s talk of bail and a quarantine period and the sense that once the eldest son is dropped off, they will never see him again. Is he going on some kind of intergalactic expedition? Or is he being groomed for a suicide attack? And as if to release us from this perpetual state of not knowing, the film makes various attempts at pathos that fall flat, like the revelation that the family dog is sick and dying. The most consequential absence in Hit the Road might just be the lack of the documentary-esque dimension that tends to carry Iranian cinema. Without that rawness, it’s the hard-to-digest artificiality of the movies that comes to the fore.