Stream It Or Skip It: ‘A Hero’ on Amazon Prime, a Tangled Iranian Drama About a Hapless Man Who Does Precisely the Right Wrong Thing

Now on Amazon Prime, A Hero added more hardware to Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s shelf, most notably the Cannes Grand Prix, which will go next to his Best Foreign Language Film Oscars for 2011’s A Separation and 2016’s The Salesman. He’s known for his immersive dramas exploring morality within Iranian culture, and A Hero is no different, telling the story of a man who may end up being endlessly punished for making a difficult, but ultimately honorable decision. Life, eh? Drives you nuts and mad and to drink sometimes.

A HERO: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Trigger warning: This movie depicts so many instances of exasperating frustration, it may fray your nerves to sub-microscopic shreds and grind your patience to dust. Rahim (Amir Jadidi) has been in prison for three years and counting. He has a two-day leave, and then he’ll have to go back to serving a sentence of undisclosed length, for being unable to pay back a significant debt to a private lender. Yet he’s smiling wide: He doesn’t just get to see his girlfriend-on-the-sly, Farkhondeh (Sahar Godust), but she found a handbag on the street with 17 valuable gold coins in it. The plan is to cash them in, pay off his creditor Bahram (Mohsen Tanabandeh) and get out of jail. They’ll be able to get married, and he’ll get to see his young son, who’s staying with Rahim’s sister and brother-in-law.

Easy as pie – pie at the end of a maze designed by M.C. Escher. Turns out the coins aren’t worth enough to pay the debt in full, and gold prices fluctuate every hour anyway, and Bahram doesn’t want a portion of the debt, he wants it all, and besides, shouldn’t they try to find the coins�� rightful owner? What would YOU do? Don’t answer that. Cross that nightmare bridge that’s on fire and falling down when you come to it. Rahim puts up fliers and he goes back to prison and the woman who lost the coins calls the prison and why did he give out the prison’s number, shouldn’t he have given her a cell phone number? He’s not allowed a cell phone in prison, he says, but didn’t he text Bahram about paying back the debt? Yes, but he used another prisoner’s cell phone, and now that guy is probably in trouble for it now and is pissed at Rahim. The whole movie goes like this.

And so it continues, Rahim running as the road crumbles behind him, inches from his heels. The woman retrieves her purse with the coins and is relieved, she’s a humble laborer who scraped the money together by doing countless menial tasks. The prison wardens know what he did because the coin woman called the prison number – please don’t give out the prison number anymore, Rahim, and he says OK, he won’t – and they call a reporter to do a feelgood story about their morally upright prisoner who’ll make the prison look good on TV. Rahim really f—s himself when he fibs a little and says he found the handbag even though it was actually Farkhondeh, because he wants to keep their relationship secret for now, and even though the fib doesn’t come back to devour him immediately, just sit tight, that little minnow will become Jaws soon enough, and this movie is heavily populated with minnows.

The news story makes Rahim an upstanding citizen in the eyes of the public and a charity organization raises money for him with the help of Rahim’s son, who makes everyone extra generous because he speaks with a debilitating stutter, and maybe Rahim feels bad about exploiting him, especially because it gets him nowhere with Bahram because the money raised still isn’t enough and did you know Bahram is Rahim’s ex-wife’s brother in law who was nearly financially ruined by the loan he gave to a man who he calls a shyster, which could be true, although we only see him as a reasonably good-hearted guy who’s maybe a little slippery?

The charity arranges a job for Rahim – he’s still in prison, by the way, but on leave again – but the employer wants to fact-check his story because there’s rumors on social media that he made it up. Can he find the coin woman to corroborate? Of course not, because she didn’t use her own phone to make the calls, but maybe her cab driver knows, and then there’s a whole f—ing thing with the cab driver, and then another thing with the cab driver later in the movie. Eventually, the cab driver, the wardens, the charity people, the girlfriend, the stuttering son, the fact-check guy, the sister and the brother-in-law are all involved in this impossibly tangled impossibility, and I’m only sitting here watching a movie, and I want to move to Antarctica to live with the penguins.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: There’s a Coen Bros.-esque level of farce here – think A Serious Man minus the bleakness. There’s also a Safdie Bros.-level of ramped-up layers of tension – think Uncut Gems minus the fatalism.

Performance Worth Watching: Jadidi and his infectious smile make for a remarkably amiable, sympathetic character despite being beyond-remarkably put-upon by, if not fate, then society – until he loses it and gets violent, albeit only briefly and mostly inconsequential, and makes everything exponentially worse. Anyway. Jadidi’s performance is wholly believable – and, thankfully, subtly comic, lest the movie destroy him, and us, with his rampant misfortune.

Memorable Dialogue: Rahim’s sister Malileh sums it up for all of us: “I don’t know. I’m lost now.”

Also, this exchange:

Rahim: They’re saying I lied. I didn’t.

Warden no. 1: But you didn’t tell the truth.

Warden no. 2: You’re either very smart or very simple.

Rahim: If I was smart, why would I be in jail?

Sex and Skin: None, because I’m convinced a single peck on the cheek would become another ludicrously detailed, morally ambiguous set of circumstances avalanching on poor Rahim, and the movie’s already giving us more than two hours of that.

Our Take: You. Just. Gotta. Laugh. To stop yourself from going crazy. Poor Rahim. Poor, poor Rahim. Sure, OK, he made some bad decisions and allowed others to take advantage of him and took a lot of lousy advice. But he gave the coins back to the coin lady! He can always go home, give his son a bath and tell him that the tiny diamond in the core of his heart, the one that made him do the right thing instead of the selfish thing, is pure. He’ll never sell that, and even if he tried, the gem dealer would find a flaw in it and ask him where he got it and if it’s actually his and someone would film Rahim getting upset at the dealer and post the video on social media and everyone in the world would hate him and ruin him on a whim.

Farhadi’s screenplay is a windshield with a chip in it, and all it takes is the slightest bump to make the glass spiderweb into countless fragments. You can still drive down the road because the windshield is still intact, but you’d struggle in your attempt to see the world through a million-zillion little shards and maybe you should stop before you implicate someone else by running them over. The world sees only the car and not the person at the wheel and – all right, enough with the metaphors. A Hero challenges and tests us about the nature of truth and deceit, exploring the bureaucracy of culture and society. Its characters debate reality and hypotheticals until they blur together. One person’s story leads to another leads to another, comprising a tangled skein of threads stitched together to make modern Iran, with the debtor’s prison and relative collectivism that separates it from the Western world, but with the self-serving exploitation and ubiquitous digital media they share.

This is a smart, engrossing film, bursting at the seams with ideas, pragmatic and philosophical. At times, the film feels more like an exercise than a story – how many mishaps, misfortunes and mistakes can Farhadi pile upon his poor tortured protagonist, before leading him to a ruthlessly ambiguous non-conclusion. But it also occasionally sweeps aside the clutter and finds simple truths in quiet moments – Rahim’s son crying himself to sleep after his father states his intention to remarry, for example, or a shot of a person on the street who’s clearly struggling to survive, and experiencing a life far worse than Rahim’s. Farhadi cultivates dramatic power by pairing such scenes with speculation and allegory, crafting one man’s maddening existence as an ant in a colony with no dead ends, just endless tunnels leading farther and farther and farther away from home.

Our Call: A Hero is a hell of a movie. STREAM IT, but only if you don’t mind two hours of nigh-crippling agitation.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.