Law of Tehran

Samad, a detective on the drug squad, works his way up the rungs of a distribution network towards Naser, the boss who never gets caught. Then the film stops chasing and starts watching the system: custody, court, sentence, execution. It is not interested in the pursuit. It is interested in who gets punished and on what basis. Once Naser is taken the film's centre shifts, and we look at an overloaded prison system in which the criminal and the policeman are stuck in the same dead end. The form is dense and crowded: long scenes, overlapping dialogue, people shouting. The raids are shot like documentary. The title is a statistic: the number of addicts living in Iran, six and a half million. Samad points out in the film that the figure keeps rising. Saeed Roustaee wrote and directed. Payman Maadi plays Samad and Navid Mohammadzadeh plays Naser. Roustaee won Best Director at the Tokyo International Film Festival in 2019, and the film holds 95 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Who it is for: viewers who want hard crime drama and follow contemporary Iranian cinema. Who it is not for: anyone troubled by the level of violence and hopelessness. The last half hour leaves no way out at all.