‘The Old Bachelor’: Rotterdam Review

Dir/scr: Oktay Baraheni. Iran. 2024. 191mins.

Two middle-aged brothers live unwillingly under the meaty thumb of their monstrous, bullying father  in a once comfortable, now squalid Tehran apartment in a rundown building. The sons hope to persuade their father to sell the building, but instead he rents the upper floor to a charismatic divorcee who – unbeknown to her – he hopes to marry. Her presence sets in motion a devastating chain of events and simmering jealousies which look set to tear the family apart. Oktay Baraheni’s superb second feature is a gripping domestic saga of bad blood and worse men.

A gripping domestic saga of bad blood and worse men

With its vividly insalubrious backdrop of drug-taking, prostitution and destructive, savage chauvinism, this a vision of Iran that is infrequently seen on screen. There are some parallels with Ali Abbasi’s Holy Spider perhaps, which was inspired by the same real-life serial killer case as Ebrahim Irajzad’s Killer Spider, for which Baraheni wrote the screenplay. Winner of Rotterdam’s Big Screen Competition, The Old Bachelor should be a title of considerable interest for festival programmers. Distributors or bespoke streamers who can get past the potential stumbling block of a three-hour-plus running time could be rewarded by critical support and positive audience word of mouth.

The Old Bachelor follows Baraheni’s debut, Bridge Of Sleep (2016), which was loosely based on ’Crime And Punishment’ by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Once again, there are Russian literary inspirations for this picture: Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov is pointedly referenced in an early scene in the bookshop where one of the brothers, the subdued Ali (Hames Behdad) works, and Baraheni also cites The Idiot as one of his influences. Indeed,  Baraheni’s writing is one of the key factors in the film’s ability to sustain its tension successfully over a lengthy running time. He has a gift for crisply persuasive dialogue that seems, on a superficial level, to be almost banal, but which peels back to reveal decades-old, bone-deep wounds.

Equally important are the uniformly excellent performances: Leila Hatami (best known for Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation) is a magnetic presence as the divorcee, her sultry gaze able to stop a man in his tracks. It is no wonder that both the old man, Gholam (Hassan Pourshirazi), and his first son Ali (the eponymous bachelor), are both smitten by her. As Ali, Behdad plays a man whose inherent decency and virtue have made him a target, not just for his father and half-brother, brash aspiring property developer Reza (Mohammad Valizadegan), but for any wannabe alpha male looking to demonstrate his status. Ali’s spirit may be beautiful, but it is broken.

Valizadegan’s nervy, impressionable Reza is more hot-headed but less consistent. He fantasises about murdering his father but can be bribed to side with his dad in an argument with the gift of a new phone. But the dark heart of the film is Pourshirazi, magnificent in the role of Gholam. He has the lumbering gait of a creature that has just emerged from hibernation; huge, crushing hands that are designed to hurt. He smokes heroin and picks fights in a dingy basement room filled with fellow addicts. His larded complexion has a perpetually glistening layer of dope sweat. He is the kind of man who would rather destroy everything and everyone than admit defeat.

The location choices – in particular the apartment – are grimly atmospheric, and the production design adds layers to our understanding of this murky family history. Handsome paintings (of murderous patriarchs) hint at a time when the building was filled with antiques and culture, but now the camera lingers on the oily, encrusted fingerprint on the button of the microwave oven, and Gholam’s drawers full of half-empty methadone bottles. A pressure cooker tension builds in the apartment, along with the cigarette butts and takeaway cartons, leading to a killer final act of sustained and bloody ferocity.