There Is No Evil is a painful, beautifully humane film about complicity and resistance

Heshmat is basically a respectable Iranian citizen – and that’s how the filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof, who was arrested last month, shows him in the first chapter of his four-part death penalty. There Is No Evil. He frees a trapped cat, picks up his equally exemplary wife from the school where she works, runs errands at the supermarket, vacuums his mother’s apartment, eats with his wife and daughter at a pizza restaurant.

During the first half hour of his film, Rasoulof takes all the time for the everyday, as if he is now confident that his audience knows that waiting pays off. They are scenes such as the Austrian provocateur Michael Haneke, one of Rasoulof’s examples, also likes to serve them. They almost invite you to doze off, even though you know, you feel, that you can be rudely startled at any moment. This also applies to this film, which was awarded a Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 2020.

Heshmat’s story ends with the unveiling of his daily work, which he drives to in the evening in neat clothes. After going through a sterile system of corridors, he carries out the execution of a row of hanged men. Press the button – and you’re done. It’s like shopping.

This is Rasoulof’s depiction of the banality of evil (he also mentions Hannah Arendt as a source of inspiration): the common man as a small, but crucial part of a destructive system.

It testifies to higher storytelling how Rasoulof always introduces a new executioner in the following stories, allowing more and more air and light in the process. In the second chapter, the conscript Pouya is so panicked by an execution order that he hopes to escape from prison with a weapon swinging. Javad, another conscript, discovers in the third story—during his leave of absence, during which he plans to propose to his beloved—how devastatingly far his executioner’s work reaches. And Doctor Bahram has quite a family secret to reveal when his niece comes to visit from Germany.

The executioner ensemble offers in There Is No Evil a multifaceted portrait of the death penalty system, a system of pumpjacks and refusers whose work kills far more than the direct victims. It is a painful, beautifully humane film about complicity and resistance, which can easily compete with Rasoulof’s powerful earlier work on the crushing power of a totalitarian state.