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In A Hero, an act of good samaritanism slowly morphs into what feels like the onset of a curse. Near the beginning of Asghar Farhadi’s great new movie, a young man named Rahim (a wonderful Amir Jadidi) helps organize the return of a lost purse found on the street by his girlfriend, Farkhondeh (Sahar Goldust), while he’s on a 48-hour prison leave. (He’s there in the first place because he couldn’t pay back a debt). The gesture unexpectedly lands him the temporary status of a local hero. Because they’re starved for positive coverage to distract from an inmate’s recent suicide, prison authorities eagerly publicize this simple act of kindness, landing Rahim a flattering feel-good segment on a TV news show and an honor from a high-profile nonprofit. 

An optimistic part of us might assume the newfound goodwill around Rahim’s once-irreputable name will help escort in a much-needed break from his woes. Maybe these image-enhancing 15 minutes of fame will lead to an opportunity to finally pay back the understandably still-frustrated ex-father-in-law (Mohsen Tanabandeh) who loaned him the money to start his failed business. 

But in what is clearly a move by Farhadi to in part grapple with the moral maze that online virality seems to increasingly beget these days, those in Rahim’s immediate circle and on social media start prodding at his story until the innocuous white lies that decorated it become so hot to the touch he might as well have fabricated the entire thing. Why did he say he found the bag when it was, in fact, Farkhondeh who had? Was the gesture really so kind-hearted if he had initially tried pawning off the valuable coins that had been in the purse? Why is the woman to whom the bag was apparently returned suddenly so hard to find? Did she ever really exist? Reader, she did, but in A Hero Rahim is doomed to never catch anything close to a break. 

Though some of the later narrative beats feel a little too engineered to induce stress to feel totally organic, A Hero marks another fine example of what Farhadi is best known for two decades into his filmmaking career: domestic dramas so expertly tense that those who write about his movies love noting that they feel like thrillers. A Hero is obviously tension-laden just because of its storyline’s construction. Much of its runtime depends on scenes featuring people being openly doubtful of Rahim, with the latter, scared of hurting his newly-moving-upward reputation, misguidedly if comprehensibly only reiterating lies and half-truths to keep everything from falling apart. (He really can’t win either way.) But much of our stress also derives simply from our understanding of how human Rahim and the few loyal to him are. These aren’t fleshly projections of a cinematic kind of moral certitude but people like us, always wanting to do good without forsaking personal well-being. Our painful familiarity with being caught in a lie ensures the precarity of their decision-making makes us jittery, too.

Farhadi’s unwavering humanism prevents Rahim from ever existing on either side of a kind of simplistic sneaky grifter/beleaguered good-guy spectrum, and the film is better and more interesting because of it. He just comes across like a man trying but failing to dig himself out of a hole, and you care about what happens to this increasingly frail man with a shy smile even if it doesn’t necessarily result in fixed-in-place sympathy. (Farhadi’s writing suggests he wants us to be a little doubtful of the character, too.) 

Even without much screen time spelling things out, Farhadi makes so lucid the pain Rahim has brought on peripheral characters, like the long-anguished ex-brother-in-law, the ever-patient Farkhondeh, and his young son struggling with a severe speech impediment, that we’re never not aware of the emotional and in some cases financial havoc Rahim has wreaked without even really meaning to. Farhadi makes everyone Rahim affects so vivid, even with just a few lines, that you can almost picture a movie in which they’re the protagonist in miniature. A Hero isn’t a cut-and-dried morality tale but a compelling examination of how even split-second decisions can have mammoth ramifications. It’s a convincing case against snap judgment, a stealthy plea for empathy.