The Hunter

The plot is spare, but unsettling imagery elevates The Hunter to the level of pure cinema.

This is a parable about modern Iran, and like many recent Iranian films it leaves its meaning to the viewer. One of the wise decisions by Rafi Pitts, its writer, director and star, is to include no dialogue that ever actually states the politics of its hero.

Though The Hunter maintains the same even tone after it turns into a chase thriller, the look begins to resemble the work of William Friedkin and Walter Hill in its clean, elemental approach to action.

Filmed during the months leading up to the 2009 presidential election in Iran, The Hunter still seethes with fury - and anticipates the blood that would spill after the vote.

In The Hunter, writer-director Rafi Pitts manages an atmosphere of choked, ambiguous dread, somehow naturalistic and hallucinatory at once, that recalls nothing less than Godard's Alphaville.

Cinematographer Mohammad Davudi's nighttime shots of jammed Tehran highways help convey the society's dehumanization. Scenes of a vast forest outside the city, where Ali releases tension by hunting, are powerful in their own, sparse way.

The whole film, in fact, which Pitts wrote and directed, lurks on the borders of the unspecified. That is the source of its cool, but also of its sullen capacity to annoy.