Saturday 9 April 2022

Zalava (4 Stars)


This is the ninth film in the Stuttgart Fantasy Film Festival Nights.

This is a change for me. I've seen a few Iranian films in the past, but they were all films made by ex-pat Iranians with dialogue in the Iranian language, Farsi. This is the first film I've ever seen by an Iranian director living in Iran. However, it's set in a Kurdish area, so the dialogue is in a mix of Farsi and Kurdish. I can't tell them apart.

The film takes place in 1978, shortly before the Iranian revolution. Sergeant Masoud Ahmadi is an official assigned to the remote town of Zalava. There's an uproar in the town when they claim there's a demon on the loose. The local belief is that a demon can be exorcised by shooting someone in the leg. Masoud doesn't believe in the superstitions, so he confiscates everyone's rifles to stop them shooting one another.

There's an exorcist called Amardan who enters a house and traps the demon. He brings it out in a bottle. Masoud doesn't believe him, so he arrests Amardan as a charlatan. Amardan warns him that the demon hasn't been fully tamed and may still become strong enough to break out of the bottle.

This is an intense, overbearing film. The viewer is left in suspense whether the demon is genuine or not until the end of the film.

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