Review: There Is No Evil Fiercely Confronts a Nation’s Moral Well-Being

The four shorts that comprise writer-director Mohammad Rasoulof’s Golden Bear-winning There Is No Evil complicate the declarative nature of the film’s title in fascinating ways. There is evil in the world, of course. More specifically, there’s evil in a nation that forces its young men to enlist in military service that may require them to execute their fellow citizens. There’s evil in choosing between killing just one person or many, and in killing some so that one can love others. There’s evil in bureaucracy, in family secrets, in selective rectitude. And there’s evil in selfish refusals masquerading as ethical stances.

In fact, for Rasoulof, evil seems to be the most significant organizing force of daily life—the evil of past actions, present decisions, and atemporal structures—in a culture such as Iran’s that accepts murder as a legitimate form of punishment. There Is No Evil, then, doesn’t try to facetiously dispel the statement that its title makes by asking whether or not evil exists. It ponders, instead, how citizens position themselves in relation to the inevitable evil that runs through their country’s core, architecting its every corner and generations of people.

Each section of the film is independently titled and abides by a different genre, and as such could function as a standalone short. The first is arguably the strongest because we’re still oblivious to the games Rasoulof may want to play with us. The filmmaker masterfully plays off of our ignorance, spending almost the entirety of the segment making us believe in a realistic portrait of the everyday life of a perfectly happy, and drama-free, middle-class family in Iran, saving one of the most unexpected plot twists in all of cinema to the very last shot.

In retrospect, Heshmat’s (Ehsan Mirhosseini) life should have been too good to be true. When we first meet him, he’s playing the neighborhood hero, saving a kitten stuck in a hole. He then patiently listens to his wife’s (Shahi Jila) infinite list of mundane complaints as he drives, in a lengthy sequence that recalls Abbas Kiarostami’s Ten. We also see Heshmat vacuum his elderly mother’s entire apartment, tenderly dye his wife’s hair after helping her pick out the right color, and being an example of honesty at the local grocery store. It isn’t until we’ve grown completely accustomed to the idea that there is no “catch” to this portrait of family life in Iran that Rasoulof punches us in the gut with a flawlessly timed denouement.

The jolt is at once affective and intellectual, as you may feel as if you understand the film in an instant, as an uncompromising exposure of the banality of evil, then spend the rest of it nursing your shock. It’s clever for Rasoulof to not use the structure of the first segment, with its last-minute narrative blow, as a model for the ones that follow. Rather, There Is No Evil takes the shape of a filmic anthology, as if multiple directors with distinct sensibilities had been asked to share their musings on the same topic: the various shapes that guilt and honor (or lack thereof) might take in a context of state-sanctioned death. Through this chameleonic approach, Rasoulof unravels the various conceptual threads that emerge from the first story with shorts that are still full of suspense and mystery but that allow us to situate ourselves much sooner, and as such participate in the drama in a more cerebral fashion.

In another impeccably orchestrated segment, we find a soldier, Pouya (Kaveh Ahangar), wallowing in despair as he awaits the order to execute his first prisoner. The story evokes Dostoevsky, as our reluctant hero spends the night with his barrack mates discussing the many ways he can escape his predicament, all of which seem to lead to a dead end still teeming with some fatal injustice. It’s just a question of who will end up pulling the trigger, or pushing the stool, in a world where all bodies are marked to either slay or be slayed.

The ending here is also shocking. Not because it suddenly illuminates a crucial blind spot in our understanding of the story, but due to its unexpected playfulness. The idea of captive life already being a kind of death takes shape through a sudden genre transition when the film surrenders to the lightheartedness of a musical. As reunited lovers sing the Italian resistance song “Bella Ciao” in a getaway car in a moment of ecstatic euphoria, the taste of freedom becomes the only experience worth seeking—whatever the cost, and however brief.