\tIn his second theatrical film, multi-hyphenate Mehran Modiri, one of Iran\u2019s most beloved TV satirists, turns his hand to the thriller genre with mixed results. He writes, directs and performs in the intense but increasingly contrived social issues movie \u201c6 A.M.,\u201d in which a small incident escalates into a big tragedy. Although the indie feature mostly looks and plays like a middling TV drama, it still paints a surprisingly critical picture of the country by showing how suddenly and completely the state can interfere with the behind-closed-doors lives of ordinary citizens.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\tPhilosophy student Sara (Samira Hassanpour) is nervously preparing to catch a 6 a.m. flight to Toronto, where she will live for the next three years while she pursues her doctorate. As she eats what she jokingly refers to as the \u201cLast Supper\u201d with her university professor parents and brother Siavash (Mehrdad Sedighian), she\u2019s interrupted by a call from her close friend Fariba (Mona Farjad) who insists that Sara stop by a final gathering of her peers, and won\u2019t let her say no. Sara gives in, marking the first of a number of bad decisions that will haunt her over the course of the evening. \t<\/p>\n
\tThe gathering hosted by Fariba and Peyman (Mansour Nasiri) in a spacious, Western-style apartment boasting an odd choice of art, proves larger than expected, with the male and female friends eating pizza and drinking illegal alcohol while discussing some social problems, including high rents. Although Sara really needs to go to the airport, Fariba has planned several music performances and she won\u2019t let Sara out the door before they take place.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
\t\t\t \t\t\tPopular on Variety\t\t \t \t\t \t \tAt the 35-minute mark, the doorbell rings, but instead of more friendly faces come to bid Sara goodbye, it\u2019s the police, acting on a citizen report about a disturbance. By now, it\u2019s already touch and go for Sara to make her flight. With the likelihood that the officers will force those at the party to go to the police station, her friends help her to hide in an air duct. The remaining 80 minutes feature surprises best discovered in the moment, during which the tension remains high while the action becomes progressively far-fetched.<\/p>\n
\tModiri, who also appears as a high-ranking security services hostage negotiator in the film\u2019s final section, inundates his screenplay with aural and visual foreshadowing. The dialogue includes an overwhelming number of mentions of \u201clast\u201d and \u201cfinal.\u201d However, in a more innovative choice, he eschews the ticking clock device another filmmaker might use to increase the running-out-of-time tension and instead cuts to black between his short scenes, inculcating a sense of finality, claustrophobia and dread. \t<\/p>\n
\tApart from Sara, the supposedly smart woman who keeps making stupid choices, the other characters are entirely one-dimensional. As her supportive brother, Sedighian is totally unconvincing in his over-the-top, last-act actions. The low-budget production design wavers between too obvious (Sara framed behind the bars of the locked and sealed apartment) and perplexing (why is Peyman\u2019s apartment furnished with a huge Marilyn Monroe photo, a copy of Vermeer\u2019s The Girl With a Pearl Earring and Da Vinci\u2019s outstretched hands?)\u00a0<\/p>\n
\tThe film opened in Iran this summer, but failed to attract much audience. In a country beset by social problems and where so many less talented writer-directors ape Asghar Farhadi, it\u2019s no wonder that comedies work best at the local box office.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In his second theatrical film, multi-hyphenate Mehran Modiri, one of Iran\u2019s most beloved TV satirists, turns his hand to the thriller genre with mixed results. He writes, directs and performs in the intense but increasingly contrived social issues movie \u201c6 A.M.,\u201d in which a small incident escalates into a big tragedy. Although the indie feature […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":21790,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21788","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movie"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21788","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21788"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21788\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21790"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21788"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21788"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21788"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}