[Rene]

gesehen am 29.03.2019 (BD); 4/5

Wonderful to watch this directly after THE WICKED GO TO HELL, as both films form a perfect circle: The last shot of the earlier film showed a beachscape into which two men had just vanished; the first shot of the later film starts with almost exactly the same shot - an undistinguished greyish beachscape, that only slowly is revealed to be populated by a number of cars and swarming people.

What follows feels like an minimalist remix of the second half of THE WICKED GO TO HELL. Again, a woman is held by men in an isolated beach house (although in fact, the setting is completely abstract this time: the sea is right there, but completely unreachable all the same), again, violence and desire are unseparable. Though, this time, Hossein transforms this setup not into noiry, sex-crazed existentialism, but into a cinematic echochamber. Starting from a handfull of objects - a mask, a half-eaten sandwich, a radio device etc - triggering flashbacks, the story, accompanied by a hypnotic score, unfolds almost completely wordless, through a series of gazes and movements which are not so much happening (as a result of conscious decisions made by autonomouse subjects), but rather fall into place, filling out the missing pieces of a preordained structure. This doesn't mean that the desperation isn't real, though.
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"Film is like a battleground: love, hate, action, violence, death. In one word: emotion."