Zalava review – juicy Iranian thriller pits the rational against the irrational

Sometimes all a film needs to bring everything together is a nice little MacGuffin. In the case of Zalava, it’s a glass jar that may or may not have a demon in it. Massoud (Navid Pourfaraj), an army sergeant stationed at the eponymous Kurdish village, is convinced it does not, and arrests the exorcist who produces the glass jar, Amardan (Pouria Rahimi Sam), claiming he’s extorting the villagers. On the sidelines is visiting doctor Maliheh (Hoda Zeinolabedin), whom Massoud has the hots for, and who has no strong feelings about demons either way but knows better than to rile up the wary villagers.

We're informed by an opening text that the villagers are descended from Romani people (therefore marking them out as ethnically different to other neighbouring villages) and are deeply superstitious – exorcisms are supposedly an annual occurrence, and they also frequently go wrong, resulting in amputation or death. Many are also living with a vitiligo-like affliction on their skin, further isolating them from the society around them, while the nearby army base treats them with suspicion – none more so than Massoud.

Set in a pre-revolutionary 1978 Iran (when the country was ruled by the secular if despotic Shah Pahlavi), Zalava sets itself up as a juicy and sharp mystery-thriller, pitting the rational against the irrational, a time-honoured cinematic trope. Modern day concerns no doubt hang in the background (and one suspects that setting the film in 1978 is one way of avoiding the censor’s knife), while an entire review could be spent dissecting the ways in which the film avoids falling hard on one side or the other, particularly given Islamic culture’s complex relationship with spirits and folklore: the “demon” is technically a djinn, which doesn’t have inherently negative connotations, but it's clear the villagers know it’s not to be messed with.

The script itself does a brilliant job of keeping us engaged both with the nuts and bolts of whether there is a genie in the jar or not, but also in understanding both Massoud’s scepticism and the townsfolk’s unwavering belief in the spiritual. Make your faith strong enough, of course, and it will warp reality around you all of its own will. Zalava draws thrills from both the increasingly agitated state of the townsfolk and Massoud’s own wavering belief in reality. The visual language is effective and taut, too, down to simple stuff like continually accentuating the distance between Massoud and the townsfolk in group compositions, aided by the stunning, isolated location shooting.

Nothing here exactly reinvents the wheel, although Iranian genre films are still mostly a non-starter, at least internationally (A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night and Under the Shadow were made in the US and the UK respectively, so don't quite count). But this is a very well-oiled machine. Zalava is writer-director Arsalan Amiri’s debut feature, and judging by this effort, he emerges as a confident, convincing filmmaker. Here’s hoping it gets a UK release soon.

Zalava was screened as part of the International Film Festival Rotterdam 2022. A UK release date is yet to be announced.