‘Critical Zone’ Review: ‘Taxi Driver’ Meets ‘Taste of Cherry’ in Provocative Iranian Road Movie

Jordan Mintzer
·5 min read

Ever since Abbas Kiarostami’s And Life Goes On premiered back in 1992, movies set in cars have become the modus operandi of some of Iranian cinema’s greatest works.

Kiarostami followed Life with Through the Olive Trees, where driving is also a major part of the narrative, and then made his masterly Palme d’Or winner Taste of Cherry, where the main character is at the wheel for nearly the entire film. Director Jafar Panahi, who was once Kiarostami’s assistant, won Berlin’s Golden Bear in 2015 for Taxi, in which he pretended to be a cab driver in order to scrutinize his country’s dire social situation. In 2021, Panahi’s son, Panah, made his debut with the exuberant and crowd-pleasing Hit the Road, about a family taking one last road trip together toward the Turkish border.

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There are reasons for this phenomenon. First off, driving scenes are essentially cinematic, giving filmmakers constant camera movement and framing devices via windows and mirrors, allowing them to create exhilarating tracking shots without spending tons of money. And, more specifically in Iranian films, cars have become spaces of personal freedom and exploration, permitting directors to point the camera at themselves, and their fellow countrymen, while remaining relatively anonymous and safe.

Critical Zone (Mantagheye bohrani), the gutsy, tantalizing fourth feature from director Ali Ahmadzadeh, checks all the boxes of this quintessential Iranian genre — except, that is, for the “safe” part. Chronicling one long night in the life of a drug dealer, Amir (Amir Pousti), delivering weed and other illicit substances to clients around Teheran, the film guides us through Iran’s seedy underbelly in ways rarely seen before on screen. It feels closer to Taxi Driver or the films of Gaspar Noé than to Kiarostami’s work, and yet Ahmadzadeh’s portrait of his country’s disaffected youth, especially during the current period of revolt, is just as socially vital.

In fact, Critical Zone is so socially vital that the director was banned by Iranian authorities from attending its world premiere at Locarno, where it won the Golden Leopard for best film. Other festivals should be picking it up in the months ahead, while arthouse distributors will want to take a look at such a provocative and innovative cri de cœur.

From its lengthy opening sequence-shot, where an ambulance races through an endless tunnel, eventually revealing itself to be making a drug delivery to a hoard of waiting dealers, Ahmadzadeh’s movie stands apart in both style and substance. After that scene, we follow the rather slovenly Amir back to his apartment, where he divvies up his goods into dime bags, bakes a few dozen cannabis muffins, lets his adorable little bulldog hump his leg and then sets out for a long night of work.

The rest of Critical Zone is, like Taste of Cherry, episodic in structure, tracking Amir as he drives around town to various clients, several of them women. He’s guided by a disembodied GPS voice that’s also female and seems purposely seductive, like Scarlett Johansson’s operating system in Her. “Police reported ahead,” the voice keeps warning him in Farsi, as sirens wail like distant threats that thankfully never surface: In Iran, drug trafficking is a crime punishable by either death or life imprisonment.

Amir is thus breaking the law and risking his life, but his drug dealing is shown to be more of an act of resistance — and of booze-and-weed-addled courage — than a means for him to make fast money. In one memorable sequence during the film’s second half, he delivers his muffins to a hospice filled with the elderly, administering the goodies like meds to patients who appear to be on their deathbeds. In another scene, he helps a mother with a teenage son who’s deliriously coming down from a high.

Ahmadzadeh purposely, and cleverly, focuses on a few of the upsides of illegal drug use, further underlining the inhumanity of laws that would sentence men like Amir to death by hanging. In a less dramatic but equally crucial way, his film recalls fellow Iranian director Saeed Roustayi’s The Wire-like thriller, Just 6.5, which exposed Teheran’s widespread crack problem and how it could destroy the lives of dealers and cops alike. (Roustayi just received a prison sentence for screening his last film, Leila’s Brothers, in competition in Cannes without permission from the Iranian government.)

This isn’t to say that Critical Zone doesn’t have its moments of drugged-out delirium, most memorably — and transgressively — in a batshit crazy scene where Amir picks a flight attendant up at the airport, driving her out to an empty field so they can make a deal involving opium and marijuana seeds. They then do some coke together, snorting a few lines off his iPhone, after which the attendant proceeds to masturbate until she reaches an orgasm so absurdly loud and explosive, it sounds like she’s turned into one of the monsters from Pacific Rim. Believe it or not, things get even crazier from there.

Ahmadzadeh rather subversively critiques his country’s draconian drug policies — and its repressive social laws, especially concerning women (most of whom remove their hijabs as soon as they get into Amir’s car) — while demonstrating the liberating, delirious effects certain narcotics can have, especially for a young population striving to free themselves from the grip of Iran’s suffocating theocracy.

Aesthetically, Critical Zone is very much a trip to sit through as well, with dreamy, red-filtered night visuals from cinematographer Abbas Rahimi, and a score by Milad Movahedi marked by moments of brooding, lyrical ecstasy. The sound design by Hasan Mahdavi is layered and evocative, eluding to things we often can’t see from the vehicle’s limited point of view.

In the film’s closing scenes, that POV takes center stage as we zip through the city, lights and images flying by the windshield like the famous Stargate sequence in Kubrick’s 2001. By the time Amir finishes his rounds, his nocturnal journey has traced a long and hallucinating circle where he winds up back where he started. He’s completely spent and barely able to stand up. But at least he’s still alive.

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