A Hero, review: an enthralling story of secrets, illicit cash and lies

Asghar Farhadi is one of those filmmakers whose personal style is as steadfast as Marvel’s: allowing for a few cosmetic tweaks and squeaks each time, you generally know what you’re going to get. And generally, it’s very good. The Iranian director, whose A Separation won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 2012, is a master of the twisting moral tale, in which ethical quandaries take on the character of snaky whodunits.

His latest is his best since that international breakthrough. After his recent jaunt to Madrid for the Pénelope Cruz-Javier Bardem drama Everybody Knows, A Hero returns Farhadi to Iran, whose strict social codes concerning sex and class provide a Krypton Factor-like barrage of obstacles for his protagonists to surmount – or not.

Rahim (Amir Jadidi) doesn’t come across as the surmounting type. When we meet him, he’s being let out on day release from a debtor’s prison in Shiraz, and the eager smile plastered over this divorcé’s face as he wanders outdoors suggests he’s probably in there on account of folly rather than malice. Sure enough, Rahim has been silly enough to borrow a large sum from a loan shark which he couldn’t repay, causing his guarantor Bahram (Mohsen Tanabandeh) to lose his daughter’s dowry and his life savings.

Yet things are looking up. When he meets his girlfriend Farkhondeh (Sahar Goldust) – a speech therapist at a clinic attended by his son Siavash, who struggles with a stutter – she tells him about an incredible stroke of luck. While waiting for a bus, she found a handbag full of gold coins, the sale of which would go some way towards settling Rahim’s debts. However, the coins’ value barely covers half of what he owes, and Bahram isn’t interested in dropping the charges for that.

So instead, Rahim prints some lost-and-found posters and sets out to reunite the bag with its owner. After it’s claimed by a tearfully grateful woman, the prison recognises this can be spun for PR purposes – and sure enough, the story of the honest debtor who returned a missing fortune is catnip for the local papers and TV news. But since Rahim and Farkhondeh aren’t married, the truth has to be slightly massaged: Rahim claims to have found the gold himself during his time out of prison. And from this minuscule fib, an entire thicket of complications steadily sprouts.

As usual with Farhadi, it isn’t initially clear what problems could possibly emerge from such a tiny, well-meaning infraction. But his script allows them to take shape in ways that somehow feel both wholly organic and wickedly controlled. Many of them turn on the way Rahim’s actions, once publicised, turn him into a cause célèbre. Social media begins to suspect the story is too wholesome to be true, while Bahram reasonably points out that Rahim didn’t do a good deed at all, but just his duty as a decent citizen. (“We’re in a world where people are celebrated for not doing wrong,” he tuts.)

Family members including his sister and brother-in-law are drawn into the hoo-ha, with fraught conversations unfolding over the ambient bleeps of video games and growls of passing traffic. The action always feels rooted in the greater story of the city of Shiraz itself: even a scene as simple as Rahim walking through a shopping centre becomes naturally soundtracked by a musical instrument salesman tuning a dulcimer in his booth.

In moments of conflict, Farhadi’s camera often makes a point of seeking out the children in the room, silently noting that it’s all being witnessed by the next generation, who will have to navigate similarly morally ambiguous terrain in their turn. In one heartbreaking scene, Rahim ruefully consents to a prison administrator making a YouTube video of Siavash offering a stuttering defence of his father, turning the boy’s speech impediment into an online play for sympathy. This is, quite clearly, a bloodcurdlingly cynical move – yet by this point, Rahim has found himself in a corner in which every possible choice feels like the wrong one. For him, it’s miserably unfortunate – and for us, classic Farhadi.

PG cert, 127 min. Dir: Asghar Farhadi. On Amazon Prime Video now