This increasingly nerve-jangling narco policier from Life and a Day writer-director Saeed Roustayi, who has since made the feted 2022 Palme d’Or contender Leila’s Brothers, was hailed as Iran’s highest-grossing non-comedic domestic film. Not that Law of Tehran (AKA Just 6.5), which won the audience award at Iran’s Fajr film festival back in 2019, is without a pointedly nihilistic streak of jet-black humour. For proof, check out the horrifyingly absurdist opening salvo: a drug bust that turns into a breakneck, on-foot chase sequence, climaxing in a lethal disappearing act that combines the vérité grit of The French Connection with the physical slapstick of Buster Keaton. Really. It’s a deliberately bewildering cocktail of brutal tragedy and gallows farce that runs throughout this very arresting feature.
Playing out amid the human squalor of Tehran’s addiction epidemic, this festival favourite seems even more urgent now than when it first opened in Iran four years ago. Iranian American screen polymath Payman Maadi (who made such an impact in films such as Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation) is Samad, a cop waging an apparently unwinnable war on drugs in the Iranian capital. Having rounded up a vast community of addicts living and dying within a hellscape of giant concrete pipes, Samad and his deputy, Hamid (Houman Kiai), treat their captives like cattle, stripping and humiliating them, herding them from one overcrowded prison space to the next.
