151 min | NR | May 14, 2021 | Kino Lorber
Mohammad Rasoulof made this anthology in secret while banned from filmmaking in Iran. Four stories ask what the state asks of ordinary men. The answer is that the executioner goes home and waters his plants.
There Is No Evil is four separate stories about capital punishment in Iran and the men who carry it out. Mohammad Rasoulof builds the film around a single mechanism. The death penalty requires soldiers to pull the lever, and conscripts cannot legally refuse. The first story follows Heshmat through a numbingly ordinary day before revealing what his job actually is. The film is not about executions. It is about complicity, and how a state engineers obedience by spreading the guilt thin enough that no single man feels he owns it.
Ehsan Mirhosseini plays Heshmat as a placid family man whose calm is its own indictment. He runs errands and picks up his daughter and shows no flicker of what waits at work. Kaveh Ahangar plays Pouya, a conscript who decides he cannot do it, and Ahangar lets the panic build until it has nowhere to go but action. Mahtab Servati plays Nana with a stillness that hides the cost of loving a man inside this system. Across the four parts the actors share a refusal to dramatize their dilemmas, which makes the moral weight land harder.
Rasoulof wrote and directed the film in defiance of a state filmmaking ban, and the constraint shapes the form. He shoots the first segment in flat, functional light that withholds any cue about where the story is going. The reveal arrives through a single sustained shot that turns the mundane into horror without a cut. The second segment trades that control for handheld urgency inside a cramped barracks. Each part adopts a different visual register, and the shifts force the viewer to keep re-entering the same question from a new angle.
The film argues that evil does not require monsters. It requires functionaries, paperwork, and a chain of command that lets each person say the choice belonged to someone else. Rasoulof refuses to let his characters off that easily and refuses to condemn them from a safe distance. He filmed this knowing the regime would punish him for it, and that knowledge bleeds into every frame. There Is No Evil is a work of moral seriousness that earns its title by inverting it.