‘Terrestrial Verses’ Review: A Stinging, If Repetitive, Depiction of Totalitarian Oppression

The first vignette in the Tehran-set Terrestrial Verses observes a man (Bahram Ark) in a hospital trying to register the name of his newborn child. Another shows a rideshare driver, Sadaf (Sadaf Asgari), trying to reclaim her impounded car. The film, written and directed by Ali Asgari and Alireza Khatami, is an assemblage of nine such sequences with no overarching plot or recurring characters. They are all, instead, united by a purposefully minimalist style as they traverse a broader subject matter: Each one unfolds in a lengthy static shot centered on an Iranian citizen arguing with an off-screen authority figure.

The level of conflict differs between each vignette, with some people in a better position to argue than others. But in every scenario, the focal characters are told that their desires are unreasonable or that their behaviors are aberrant, sometimes both. The man in the hospital, for one, submits a name for his child, David, that’s deemed too Western, and Sadaf’s car was confiscated because she was supposedly photographed inside of it without her hijab. All the arguments run long, the better to underscore the arbitrary or capricious nature of authority in Iran as each conflict devolves into semantics, tangents, and circular reasoning.

Even as its subject matter resonates with recent Iranian protests, Asgari and Alireza’s film sustains its style of low-key minimalism throughout. As Terrestrial Verses proceeds, it captures a steady hum of societal discontent, with one person after another bristling at the constraints laid upon them, though none of them ever explodes in rage.

While the film consciously avoids showing its various obstructive bureaucrats, they come off as something much more unsettling than a depersonalized instrument of the state. They uphold the system because it gives them power, allowing them to exercise their own biases, ambitions, and hypocrisies. There are overt abuses of power, as evinced by the suggestive overtures that a prospective employer makes to Faezah (Faezeh Rad) during a job interview. But there are also covert ones, as some bureaucrats look for any excuse to remind others of the censorial will of the state. (Sadaf’s interviewer, for instance, ends up questioning why she wears her hair so short.)

The second vignette, initially depicting a young girl, Selena (Arghavan Sabani), dancing in a clothing store while her mother consults a salesperson, is the film’s early high point. The girl wears bright clothes and light-up headphones, but every time she walks off screen, she re-enters the frame increasingly weighed down by all the layers of the heavy, drab attire that she must wear for a school ceremony. Not only is the scene visually concise in showing Selena’s discomfort, it subtly gets at how social restrictions reverberate beyond the walls of bureaucracy. The apparent authority figure in the scene would seem to be Selena’s mother, but the salesperson is the one explaining the rules that other parents are following, and then she leverages that conformity to try to sell the mother on a prayer mat.

That especially layered vignette suggests a potential beyond all the bureaucratic standoffs that come to dominate Terrestrial Verses. But the sense of repetition that the film leans into in order to acknowledge the inescapable grip of the state is as much a feature as it is a bug. Given that the majority of the vignettes revolve around someone being dehumanized from behind a desk, the sting of the commentary in Terrestrial Verses increasingly loses its power.