For many years now, the real news about Iranian society has not been seeping out of the censored news media but arriving from films like Beyond the Wall (the original title translates as Night, Interior, Wall), a powerful drama that really tears the veil off police brutality in a ruthless state clinging to power through violence and intimidation. It also describes one of the now-daily protest demonstrations staged by a starving, desperate population. How writer-director Vahid Jalilvand circumvented the ever-more-restrictive filmmaking policies is anyone’s guess, but the final CGI shot, in which the camera pulls back from a hand clutching the iron bars on a window to reveal an enormous, monolithic prison, has the punch of poetry and truth.
The shrill tone of many scenes is fully justified by the narrative (loss of a child/loss of eyesight/loss of freedom/loss of mind), but they were jarring even to some festival-goers at Venice, where the film had its world premiere in competition. The Match Factory release will depend on the support of festival juries to bring this exceptional work and its faithful portrait of Iran to the larger public.
In fact, what distinguishes Beyond the Wall from many other Iranian films from the last few years is its refusal to cloak its message in metaphor, instead telling the story of Ali and Leyla directly. Dragging the viewer into a dark, closed world whose every exit is heavily guarded, actor Navid Mohammadzadeh (I’m Not Angry, Just 6.5, Leila’s Brothers) delivers another highly original performance as a young Kurdish man who is going blind as the result of an accident. Ali stumbles around his gloomy and almost unfurnished apartment, where a single divan blends into the colorless wall behind it, bloodying his shins as he tries to get used to being sightless.
He is in the shower in the middle of a suicide attempt when the concierge pounds on his door. A woman fugitive is on the loose in the apartment complex and the police are anxious to recapture her. It’s a question of state security. Ali soon senses a presence in the empty rooms and discovers the bleeding, near-hysterical Leila (Georgian-Iranian theater actress Diana Habibi in a striking if unmodulated first screen appearance.) His gentle reassurances do little to calm her.
The empty apartment offers no place to hide, and Leila can only cower in corners while a series of intruders pounds on the door. There is conscientious Dr. Nariman, who makes it a point to medicate Ali’s eyes (Amir Aghaee, who played a medic by the same name in Jalilvand’s previous film No Date, No Signature), the menacing concierge and a police inspector who is even interested in Ali’s mail and the letters he receives from an anonymous woman. (Touchingly, he holds them an inch from his eye without being able to decipher them.)
If up to this point the story is spellbinding from the sheer force of the acting, Jalilvand soon opens it up in an infernal scene of workers protesting outside a dusty old factory under a hot sun. One man is being dragged away shouting by the police while others bang on the closed factory door, until the policemen start clubbing people and arresting them at random. (A similar scene of police clashes with factory workers who demand their back pay opens Leila’s Brothers.) Caught up in a panicked stampede, Leila gets separated from her little boy and he is lost in the chaos. Shoved into a police van, she goes from hysterics to an epileptic attack as the officer in charge waves his gun, men shout, women scream and the van careens over a dirt road at top speed. The lessons of genre filmmaking are fully on display in the edge-of-seat editing and hand-held camerawork, pushing the drama of the runaway van to the limit.
Yet far from being a simple flashback to Leila’s backstory as a fugitive, this same scene is reprised from different POVs in the course of the film, creating new stories that conflict with each other’s timelines. It’s a deliberately disorienting ploy that will not be everyone’s cup of tea, as it makes the narrative almost impossible to untangle. Perhaps only madness can fully explain the situation Ali and Leila find themselves in; and only the mind can offer an escape route.
The technical work feels simple and top-drawer, led by Adib Sobhani’s tactile cinematography that gives a texture to thick damp walls, old sofas and dusty roads. Keyvan Moghaddam designed the blind man’s apartment where most of the action takes place with a heavy emptiness and lack of patterns, as well as a lack of furniture and safe hiding places. Icelandic musician Olafur Arnalds contributes the few notes or deep, rich musical commentary, “Lynn’s Theme”. This is one of the few Iranian films to make major use of CGI work, employed to construct a fantasy prison of Kafkaesque proportions.
