Woman and Child

A few structural issues threaten to tip the balance from cinematic melodrama into TV soap as the bad news keeps on coming, but Izadyar’s sustained emotional conviction carries the vision onwards.

Roustayi handles the change of gear impeccably, though, balancing extreme events with layered characterisation.

In Saeed Roustayi’s Woman and Child, a carefully crafted and endlessly gripping drama that follows a Tehran family’s slow disintegration, it’s the supposedly joyous occasion of a marriage proposal that set the wheels of fate in motion.

The film subsides into piled-up shocks and reversals, leaving the actors to bolster the drama with emoting – not always in the most subtle of ways.

This is a story about the randomness of life in the big city, a melodramatic convulsion of grief, rage and pain which has a TV soap feel to its succession of escalating crises.

It’s a feel-bad film like no other where you have to squint for even the smallest sliver of hope as we, along with the characters, get put through the wringer with little potential for salvation.

The psychology simply doesn’t add up.