‘1001 Frames’ review: Experimental thriller shot clandestinely in Iran

Dir/scr: Mehrnoush Alia. USA/Iran. 2025. 87mins

Within the legend that kinds the framing gadget of the Persian assortment of tales often called One Thousand And One Nights, Scheherazade is a triumphant underdog, a resourceful lady who survives by harnessing the ability of narrative. However Iranian-American director Mehrnoush Alia needs us to recollect all the ladies that went earlier than her. Seen from this angle, it’s not a story of survival – it’s a horror story.

 A relentless, screw-tightening crescendo

Numerous younger ladies had been misplaced earlier than Scheherazade turned the tables on the entitled ruler who had used his place of energy to terrorize and kill them. Alia’s instinct on this highly effective, deeply uncomfortable experimental thriller is to recast the sadistic sultan as a movie director and the virgins he married and murdered as actresses who’re auditioning for an element in his subsequent venture – an adaptation of One Thousand And One Nights.

Primarily based on Alia’s 2015 brief Scheherazade, the movie was apparently shot clandestinely within the US-based director’s homeland of Iran. The set is naked: a soundstage with a dusty black ground and a single, central chair, the place actresses who’ve come to audition for the movie throughout the movie undergo a largely unseen male director’s more and more bullying prompts and questions. A single supply of sunshine, excessive up, stage proper, lends the faces of those more and more unsettled younger ladies a tenebrous chiaroscuro. 

The dramatic arc is just not an arc in any respect, however a relentless, screw-tightening crescendo. With a few exceptions, the actresses are younger. One has launched into a 14-hour journey to make the audition and appears prepared for something to get the half. However feminine boldness and feminine modesty are equally distasteful to the autocrat behind the digital camera, whose methodology – to search out his prey’s weaknesses, and manipulate them – is, we realise, one thing each remedy and sure excessive method-acting faculties have in frequent.

Performed by main Iranian theatre director and actor Mohammad Aghebati – Alia’s manufacturing associate at Maaa Artwork –  the director-within-the-film is cagey in regards to the venture he’s casting. He tells his sceptical ex-wife, to whom he has promised the a part of Scheherazade, that the road of younger actresses ready exterior are there to play the unfortunate virgins who preceded her character. “I can’t solid corpses”, he barks.

Alia creates empathy by way of uncertainty. Because the unnamed male director’s innuendos change into extra specific and threatening, his victims go from disbelief to one thing like terror. Some battle again; one is canny sufficient to suspect that that is all an act. We, the viewers, undergo from related doubts. Is that this an arthouse Candid Digicam venture? Are we watching real audition tapes of actresses summoned by the precise Mohammad Aghebati? A tension-releasing coda that leaps the fourth wall doesn’t a lot resolve the problem as elevate extra questions, as the feminine director and the male director-within-the-film arrive on set to congratulate and console. 

If this spectacular debut characteristic has a flaw it’s that, for all of the emotional buy and veracity of the performances on show right here – typically expressed by way of the eyes alone, in a collection of close-ups, in the perfect horror custom – it stays one thing of an train. Temporary references to honour killings, veils and Islamic Republic movie censorship aside, 1001 Frames may very well be set anyplace the place a poisonous patriarchy makes use of violence and coercion to impose itself. This can be Alia’s intention, however the drive for universality makes this admirable movie a good more durable watch than it already is.