I felt duty bound to see this film by Mahnaz Mohammadi, supporting the sisterhood by going to see a film that said from the outset that it was about a woman being tortured in an Iranian prison.

Reviews talked about the gripping first 20 minutes and they weren’t wrong. It was one of the emptiest Melbourne Film Festival sessions I’ve been to, so I’d say that the synopsis may have been a little bit off-putting. It’s not as viscerally full on as it sounds – we don’t see the typical expectations of torture – and is much more internal and psychological.

That first 20 minutes are from Roya‘s (Melisa Sözen) point of view, as she is in her cell about to be taken out to be coerced into making a confession. We can’t see much, she is blindfolded, made to look down, and we can just hear her breathing and understand that she is unwell and disoriented. All she can see are shoes and blood stains on the floor.

She is granted leave for three days with an ankle monitor so she can, as she thinks, attend her father‘s funeral but that has been a subterfuge by her guards. Someone has died though, and she stumbles through each event with her nightmares of incarceration bleeding into her reality.

The crises for her are her father with Alzheimer’s, who has asked her to end his life rather than leave him alone to suffer, and the parents of her students at her university who are also under investigation for her supposedly encouraging them to burn their head scarves.

There is a boyfriend who may be cheating on her with her best friend, there is an empty apartment with a flickering neon light, and there are sounds of footsteps reminiscent of those of her interrogators.

That flickering light is the thing that gives us a clue as to what is happening, as it is the same in her prison cell as it is in her apartment. The other significant aspect of the film is that Roya doesn’t speak a word for the entire film.

A Letterboxd reviewer said that the film was okay and a bit reminiscent of Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident – that must be just about the footsteps being a trigger – but that it didn’t add anything new to cinema about Iranian torture prisons. As if that is such a trope that it has been done to death.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like this, where you are in that moment all the time, and although it is an uncomfortable watch, you definitely get to meditate on the choices that you do have. Even if they are only in your imagination.