Saeed Roustaee’s Woman and Child immediately immerses us in a specific Tehran, one where a woman’s fortitude is less a celebrated trait and more the daily currency for survival. Stability, it seems, is a luxury item, perpetually on backorder; a societal construct more discussed in theory than experienced in practice, particularly by those not holding the patriarchal reins.
Here, Mahnaz (Parinaz Izadyar, already radiating a potent weariness that feels generations deep), a widowed hospital nurse, navigates the labyrinthine demands of her existence. Her two children, the spirited, verging-on-hellion teenage son Aliyar and the younger, more placid Neda, are both her anchor and, at times, the gathering storm itself – a common enough paradox in the domestic sphere, yet one freighted here with particular cultural weight.
Mahnaz juggles the relentless pressures of her profession with the intricate, often thankless, dance of single parenthood, all while tentatively exploring a new romantic entanglement with ambulance driver Hamid – a man who, shall we say, arrives with his own rather specific set of operating instructions, not all of which appear designed for Mahnaz’s benefit.
The initial atmosphere is one of carefully managed chaos, a social realism (before realism, as it is wont to do in such narratives, decides to take a rather dramatic, extended holiday) underscored by the faint, persistent hum of a world where a woman’s choices are often pre-selected from a disconcertingly short menu. One gets the sense that the tightrope she walks is strung just a little higher, with considerably less net, than for others.
The Cast of a Precarious Compact
Mahnaz herself is a study in contained dynamism, a woman perpetually attempting to reconcile the irreconcilable: the Florence Nightingale demands of her nursing shifts with the Herculean (and often thankless) labors of raising two distinctly different iterations of offspring. Her dedication to young Neda, a quiet counterpoint to the domestic opera, and the whirlwind that is Aliyar, is profound. Yet, this maternal devotion is a complex force. Her inherent capability, the steel in her spine, is evident; this is no wilting victim. Still, her immediate familial support – a pragmatic, straight-shooting mother and her younger sister, Mehri, who drifts through the household with a purpose yet to fully coalesce – forms an all-too-thin bulwark against a tide of societal expectation.
Aliyar, the teenage son, is less a character and more a small, charismatic weather system, capable of brilliant sunshine and sudden, category-three squalls. His transgressions – a brazenly cheeky romantic overture to his mother’s thirty-something work colleague here, a surprisingly sophisticated classroom gambling ring (involving, one notes with a certain grim amusement, a spinning top, that ancient symbol of vertiginous fate and wobbling control) there – are par for his disruptive course.
Mahnaz’s response often involves a fierce, almost reflexive, apologism. Is it unconditional love, the fierce lioness defending her cub? Or is it the desperate, pre-emptive damage control of a woman acutely aware that the Iranian patriarchy offers precious few safety nets for boys whose rebellion is not swiftly curbed, or at least artfully concealed? A bit of both, one suspects.
Then there is Hamid, the ambulance-driving suitor, whose flirtatious charm possesses an almost unsettling polish, like a sales pitch honed to bypass rational thought. His marriage proposal to Mahnaz doesn’t quite land as a romantic inevitability but more as a carefully considered next step, laden with troubling, non-negotiable codicils. Chief among these is his insistence that her children be rendered temporarily invisible – erased from the home, their very existence unacknowledged – for the critical inspection by his visiting parents.
This isn’t merely a peculiar request; it’s a full-blown, klaxon-blaring indicator of his underlying worldview, one where Mahnaz’s prior life, embodied by her children, is perceived as a complication to be managed, a debit on his social ledger. He subtly projects an air of saintly condescension, doing her the grand favor. One might term his particular brand of self-interest ‘conditional magnanimity,’ if one were feeling exceptionally charitable. (One rarely is.) The societal pressure on a widow to remarry, to find a male ‘guardian,’ hangs unspoken but heavy, nudging Mahnaz towards what increasingly looks like a pact with a smiling devil.
The Tightening Gyre of Consequence
Aliyar, bless his uncontainable, problematic spirit, continues his almost dedicated campaign of minor anarchies. The spinning top gambling affair – that small wooden totem now freighted with an almost unbearable symbolism of chance, chaotic orbits, and the giddy illusion of control just before it all topples – proves the final, exasperated straw for the school authorities.
Mr. Samkhanian, a teacher embodying the weary face of institutional limits (and, one must concede, a not entirely unreasonable desire for classroom order), delivers the inevitable verdict: expulsion. Mahnaz, naturally, mounts a defense, a passionate, if predictably futile, counter-narrative against the cold, bureaucratic logic of accrued consequences. Her maternal loyalty, so fierce, here begins to look like a desperate gamble against a stacked deck.
Meanwhile, Hamid’s quiet insistence on a de-childed domestic sphere for his parental inspection escalates from peculiar request to non-negotiable condition. The demand that Mahnaz perform this temporary vanishing act with her offspring is a masterclass in the soft coercion that underpins many a patriarchal bargain.
The stripping of her children’s portraits from the walls becomes a poignant, almost ritualistic, act of self-effacement, a visual metaphor for the compromises she is making. Mahnaz complies, a woman navigating a minefield of “lesser evils,” a path which, as such paths invariably do, leads towards a greater, unseen detonation. The engagement ceremony itself unfolds under a palpable pall of strained smiles and unspoken truths, a tableau vivant of precarious pretence.
The subsequent, seemingly temporary, dispatch of Aliyar to the care of his paternal grandfather – a man whose defining characteristic seems to be a wheezing, joyless misanthropy, a walking embodiment of neglectful disinterest – feels like the final, fatal domino being nudged into its inexorable descent. Then, the narrative hammer falls, with a devastating quietness.
The tragedy involving Aliyar, his fatal fall, is crucially, perhaps even mercifully, elided from our direct view. We are spared the visceral spectacle, plunged instead directly into its seismic, soul-shattering aftermath. For Mahnaz, this is the event horizon, the precise moment the coordinates of her managed, stress-filled existence are utterly obliterated, replaced by a raw, gaping void of devastation. The film pivots, violently and irrevocably.
The Alchemy of Ruin: From Grief to Retribution
The loss of Aliyar is not merely a plot point; it is a tectonic shift in Mahnaz’s psychic landscape. Her grief is a raw, elemental force, consuming the carefully constructed edifice of her resilience, leaving behind a hollowed-out shell where a future (and, one suspects, a significant portion of her soul) once resided. This is grief as annihilation, the universe contracting to the unbearable pinpoint of a single, irreversible absence.
Upon this smouldering ruin, fate – or perhaps just masculine prerogative, operating with its customary, almost gleeful, callousness – heaps a fresh, almost operatically cruel, indignity. Hamid, a man whose capacity for emotional depth appears to rival that of a particularly shallow puddle, pivots his affections with breathtaking speed towards Mehri, Mahnaz’s own sister. Mehri, in a move that either strains credulity to its breaking point or speaks to a chillingly desperate pragmatism of her own (the calculus of survival in such a world is, after all, brutal), reciprocates. Swiftly, she is pregnant. This isn’t just betrayal; it’s a grotesque parody of life continuing, a second, more intimate erasure of Mahnaz’s world, performed by those who once constituted its fragile scaffolding. The timing, of course, is exquisite in its barbarity.
From the crucible of this compounded agony, a new Mahnaz emerges – or rather, an old one is stripped bare to her furious, unaccommodating core. Her grief, too vast to be contained or articulated through conventional channels, transmutes into a scalding, almost righteous rage. This is her transformation into a figure of retribution, a desperate, perhaps even nihilistic, quest for accountability in a world that offers none. She confronts her former father-in-law, whose past cruelties (the casual whipping of Aliyar, a detail that now resonates with monstrous significance) and terminal neglect were the final links in a long chain of failures.
She lashes out, with a violence that is both shocking and strangely understandable, at Mr. Samkhanian, the schoolteacher – is he a scapegoat, or a tangible symbol of an indifferent system that failed her son at every turn? She even targets Hamid’s shabby ambulance scams, a small, almost pathetic, attempt to dismantle the man who so casually dismantled her life. Her attempts to navigate the official legal system are, predictably, a Kafkaesque journey into institutional apathy, a place where female suffering is just another form to be filed, and invariably misplaced. Her actions become increasingly extreme, a chaotic dance on the edge of self-destruction – or is it a radical, albeit terrifying, form of self-assertion?
The familial bonds, predictably, fracture beyond repair. The sororal connection with Mehri, already strained, shatters completely. Mehri’s reported plan to name her impending son Aliyar feels less like a tribute and more like a final, almost surreal, act of psychic violence, ensuring Mahnaz’s wound can never truly scar over, a perpetual echo in an empty room. Mahnaz is now utterly alone, an island of incandescent fury in a sea of societal indifference and profound personal betrayal.
The Unseen Architecture of Oppression
The film meticulously, almost clinically, dissects the pervasive mechanics of what one might term ‘patriarchal gravity’ – an unseen but omnipresent force that dictates the orbits of its female characters, limits their horizons, and ensures that male desires, entitlements, and authorities (Hamid’s capricious affections, the father-in-law’s sullen power, even Mr. Samkhanian’s institutional fiat) invariably carry more mass. Female agency, within this schema, is less a birthright and more a perpetually negotiated, heavily taxed privilege. The differing standards of behaviour and accountability are not just implied; they are the brutal, unacknowledged wallpaper of this world, a given that Roustaee forces into stark, uncomfortable relief.
Mahnaz’s subsequent howl for justice, then, becomes a desperate navigation of a system seemingly designed not to hear her, or perhaps, to hear only the echoes of its own biases. Is it truly ‘justice’ she seeks in her increasingly unhinged confrontations, or merely an acknowledgment of her profound, annihilating injury from a world that would clearly prefer its women silent, compliant, and, above all, not making a scene?
Her quest highlights the grim truth that for many, particularly women challenging the established order from a position of perceived weakness, institutional ‘justice’ is an abstract noun, a luxury good they can ill afford. Her increasingly wild actions could be interpreted as a primal attempt to recalibrate these deeply skewed scales, a one-woman insurgency against an indifferent universe. Or, less heroically, the flailings of a broken mind.
The early, fragile promise of female solidarity – Mahnaz, her pragmatic mother, her sister Mehri forming a kind of ad-hoc domestic triumvirate – offers a fleeting glimpse of a potential counter-narrative, a bulwark against the encroaching chaos. Yet, this bond proves tragically susceptible to the incursions of male desire and the internalized scripts of patriarchal loyalty, fracturing with an almost textbook predictability under the weight of Hamid’s intervention. It’s a bleak commentary, perhaps, on how oppressive systems can atomize resistance by turning the oppressed against each other, leaving Mahnaz’s resilience to stand in stark, isolated, and ultimately self-consuming defiance.
Roustaee, to his credit, largely eschews the comfort of easy moral judgments. Mahnaz’s path of retribution is fraught with actions that sit uneasily with conventional heroism, pushing her into a liminal space between righteous avenger and a woman simply unmoored by an unbearable weight of suffering. The film doesn’t flinch from these uncomfortable ambiguities, forcing a confrontation with the disquieting idea that in a sufficiently broken system, the very definitions of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ can become terrifyingly distorted, their boundaries blurred beyond recognition. Responsibility, it suggests, is a diffused, perhaps ultimately unassignable, burden in such a landscape.
Framing Fury: Direction and Delivery
Director Saeed Roustaee approaches this chronicle of escalating catastrophe with a visual restlessness – a kind of ‘vérité verging on operatic’ – that often eschews the more austere poetics of some Iranian cinema for a kinetic, almost Hollywood-inflected dynamism. Adib Sobhani’s cinematography colludes in this, with a mobile camera, the occasional jarring zoom, and pointed overhead shots (that spinning top again, a recurring, if somewhat unsubtle, motif of vertiginous chance and wobbling control) amplifying the narrative’s slide from domestic naturalism into a heightened, almost unbearable emotional intensity.
Roustaee masterfully builds tension in meticulously staged sequences – Aliyar’s vibrant, chaotic school workshop is a memorable set piece of youthful energy colliding with industrial grit – often letting the story’s most devastating blows land off-screen, their impact thereby perversely magnified by what is imagined rather than seen. This calculated elision, however, sometimes dances perilously close to the precipice of soap opera as the ‘now what?’ revelations mount with a relentless, almost punishing, frequency.
That the film largely navigates these perilous tonal shifts without capsizing is almost entirely attributable to the monumental, central performance of Parinaz Izadyar as Mahnaz. Her face becomes the raw, expressive landscape upon which the entire emotional arc of the film is mapped – from harried affection and simmering anxiety to the abyss of unimaginable grief, and finally, to a terrifying, almost feral, rage. It is a performance devoid of vanity, a searing portrayal that anchors the narrative’s more extreme contortions in a bedrock of undeniable, visceral agony. She doesn’t just act the part; she embodies the storm, her psychological transformation palpable and devastating.
The supporting cast provide able, if sometimes necessarily broader, strokes against Izadyar’s searing canvas: Payman Maadi’s Hamid is a masterclass in slithery, self-serving charm that curdles into casual cruelty; Sinan Mohebi’s Aliyar, the boyish catalyst for so much woe, crackles with an untamed, ultimately tragic, energy. Fereshteh Sadr Orafaee as Mahnaz’s mother offers moments of grounding gravitas, while Maziar Seyedi as the perpetually aggrieved teacher, Mr. Samkhanian, provides a dose of (perhaps unintentional, yet nonetheless bleak) comic representation of bureaucratic exasperation. The lived-in production design contributes a crucial layer of realism to Mahnaz’s world, even as the events within it spiral into extremity.
The Unsettled Dust: Aftermath and Echoes
Roustaee offers no neat catharsis, no tidy bows on this package of pain. Mahnaz, by the film’s ambiguous close, endures – a testament, perhaps, to the stubborn refusal of the human spirit to be entirely extinguished, or maybe just a portrait of a soul too comprehensively shattered to fall any further. The relief one might feel is less for her future prospects and more a personal exhalation after prolonged immersion in her crucible of suffering.
The changes etched into her are undeniably irrevocable. A reportedly potent final visual, where the film’s title, ‘Woman and Child,’ is represented threefold, might suggest the cyclical, inescapable nature of these roles and their attendant grief, or perhaps Mahnaz’s own fractured identity, tripled in its tragic new configuration.
This is demanding cinema, a ‘feel-bad’ experience in the most profound and compelling sense; a narrative that grips with the tenacity of a recurring nightmare. It leaves a residue of profound disquiet, forcing a contemplation of what remains when almost everything is stripped away – and whether a life so unmade can ever truly be rebuilt, or merely… endured. The primary question lingers, stark and unsettling: in a world so apparently rigged, what does survival ultimately signify beyond the mere continuation of breath?
Woman and Child premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, competing for the Palme d’Or.
Full Credits
Director: Saeed Roustayi
Writers: Saeed Roustayi
Producers: Jamal Sadatian
Cast: Parinaz Izadyar, Payman Maadi, Soha Niasti, Maziar Seyyedi, Fereshteh Sadre Orafaee, Hasan Pourshirazi, Sinan Mohebi, Arshida Dorostkar, Sahar Goldoost, Javad Pourheidari, Mansour Nasiri, Rozhin Shams
Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Adib Sobhani
Editor: Bahram Dehghani
Composer: Ramin Kousha
The Review
Woman and Child
Saeed Roustaee’s Woman and Child is a harrowing, philosophically charged journey into a woman’s crucible of grief and fury within a restrictive society. Anchored by Parinaz Izadyar’s monumental performance, this emotionally relentless film masterfully dissects patriarchal power, though its potent critique occasionally succumbs to melodramatic excess. It's a demanding, unforgettable cinematic experience that lingers with unsettling questions long after the credits roll, more a visceral ordeal than a comfortable watch, but a significant one nonetheless.
PROS
- Parinaz Izadyar's towering lead performance.
- Incisive critique of patriarchal societal structures.
- Saeed Roustaee's dynamic, impactful direction.
- Deeply thought-provoking and emotionally resonant.
CONS
- Occasional narrative descent into heightened melodrama.
- Certain plot points stretch credulity.
- Unyieldingly bleak tone may prove challenging for some.
