The Charmer

Esmail is an Iranian man living in Denmark. His residence permit is about to run out, and to stay in the country he has to marry. So he moves through bars, galleries and parties: polite, good-looking, measured. Then he actually falls in love, and at exactly that moment what he left behind catches up with him. Milad Alami opens the film as a drama and turns it into a thriller. The question of who is using whom sits in two places at once: Esmail uses people, but he is himself inside a system, living in a country where his existence depends on a signature. Alami neither absolves the man nor makes a monster of him. Ardalan Esmaili's performance carries the panic under the smile without ever raising it. Born in Iran and raised in Scandinavia, Alami knows the material from the inside.