There Is No Evil (2020)
(film 150 minutes)
Directed by: Mohammad Rasoulof
Language: Persian
Rating: 3/10 | Yaser Tohidi
September 25, 2020
The movie relates four stories in four episodes about people executing the death penalty and the moral responsibility they feel for that. First is Heshmat, a middle-aged man whose day-to-day job is to execute. He does not see the people he executes but he just presses a button for doing that. He has a wife and a daughter. He takes a good care of them and, help his aged mother. He seems silent and introvert, perhaps due to his job. He sometimes just stares at red/green lights in street as these remind him of the lights in his room at work that show him when to press the button. Then we see Kaveh. He is doing his compulsory military service at a prison and he wants to go abroad after his military service. But unfortunately, his service is to execute. He cannot convince himself to do this. So, with the help of his fellow and his girlfriend, he leaves the prison just before executing a man. The third story is about Javad. He is coming back from his military service to prepare his marriage, but he finds that his girlfriend’s family are mourning for the death of their close relative, a teacher and a dissenter, who was executed. Javad remembers that in fact he, himself, has executed the teacher during his military service when he sees his photo. This has a devastating effect on Javad and his relationship with his girlfriend. The final story is about Bahram and his daughter. She is coming from Germany to visit him. Javad is a middle-aged man living in a sort of hide-out and we understand that his life is so because he has refused to execute a death penalty. He tries to explain his daughter that the circumstances of his life is due to an important moral decision he has taken in the past.
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Directed by: Mohammad Rasoulof
Language: Persian
Rating: 3/10 | Yaser Tohidi
September 25, 2020
The movie relates four stories in four episodes about people executing the death penalty and the moral responsibility they feel for that. First is Heshmat, a middle-aged man whose day-to-day job is to execute. He does not see the people he executes but he just presses a button for doing that. He has a wife and a daughter. He takes a good care of them and, help his aged mother. He seems silent and introvert, perhaps due to his job. He sometimes just stares at red/green lights in street as these remind him of the lights in his room at work that show him when to press the button. Then we see Kaveh. He is doing his compulsory military service at a prison and he wants to go abroad after his military service. But unfortunately, his service is to execute. He cannot convince himself to do this. So, with the help of his fellow and his girlfriend, he leaves the prison just before executing a man. The third story is about Javad. He is coming back from his military service to prepare his marriage, but he finds that his girlfriend’s family are mourning for the death of their close relative, a teacher and a dissenter, who was executed. Javad remembers that in fact he, himself, has executed the teacher during his military service when he sees his photo. This has a devastating effect on Javad and his relationship with his girlfriend. The final story is about Bahram and his daughter. She is coming from Germany to visit him. Javad is a middle-aged man living in a sort of hide-out and we understand that his life is so because he has refused to execute a death penalty. He tries to explain his daughter that the circumstances of his life is due to an important moral decision he has taken in the past.
There Is No Evil assumes responsibility for the action even if it is a duty. The movie shows the happiness of choosing the right decision (not to execute) and the terrible consequences of following the orders blind (to execute). The movie chooses execution as an order just because following this order means taking someone’s life and something significant is at stake. So, There Is No Evil is not about whether execution is moral or not. Rather the movie advises to question the orders and law and to measure them with truth/wisdom. If not done so, it leads to emptiness of soul, like Heshmat, or to break down of lives, like Javad and his girlfriend.
For its advice, There Is No Evil shows two happy endings by not following the orders blind and two sad ones by following them. The movie does not question the order itself and where it comes from. The moral characters do not try to change the orders. Instead they just do not obey. So, even if the two episodes are depicting two protagonists, they remain local/personal and they do not become general protagonists and the movie cannot address your expectation for creating a positive world. The world is as it is from beginning till the end and in this world, you can find some characters obeying the orders blind and the others who do not. Viewer expects conflict between these two groups and later resolution but nothing of that you find in There Is No Evil.
Click here for wikipedia page
