The Scene That Isn’t There

In the first episode of Mohammad Rasoulof’s There Is No Evil (Sheytan vojud nadarad, 2020), a man named Heshmat spends his day doing what ordinary men do. He helps neighbors retrieve a cat. He collects his wife and daughter. He takes them to visit his mother-in-law. At home, he helps his wife put highlights in her hair for a wedding the next day. Then he wakes before dawn, drives to work with visible reluctance, and presses a button that hangs several condemned prisoners.

That is the entire execution. A button. A hand. A room we do not see in any detail that would satisfy the conventions of the death-penalty film. The Berlinale programme describes the film’s four stories as “variations on the crucial themes of moral strength and the death penalty, asking to what extent individual freedom can be expressed under a despotic regime and its seemingly inescapable threats” (Berlin International Film Festival, 2020 programme). The festival also notes that Rasoulof “only creates a loose narrative link between these stories, and yet they are all tragically and inexorably connected.”

The formal decision I want to isolate is this: Rasoulof withholds the execution as spectacle and instead distributes it across four ordinary households. The switch-press in Episode I is the hinge. Episodes II, III, and IV do not repeat the execution; they reorganize its consequences into different domestic spaces — a barracks, a birthday party, a country house — so that the state’s violence is measured not by what it shows but by where it places the aftermath.

Four Stories, One Off-Screen Event

The film’s structure is documented. The Berlinale programme lists four stories: Heshmat, an exemplary husband and father who rises early each day; Pouya, who “cannot imagine killing another man, yet he is told he must do so”; Javad, whose proposal to his beloved is interrupted by a birthday surprise; and Bahram, a physician unable to practice, who explains his life as an outcast to his visiting niece. The festival describes these as “tragically and inexorably connected” despite the loose narrative link.

What the festival does not say — because it is a formal observation, not a production fact — is that the connection is spatial rather than causal. The four episodes do not share characters. They share a problem: what happens to an ordinary home when the execution enters it, or when the execution is refused and the refusal enters instead.

This is not an anthology of execution stories. It is a distribution of one execution across four households, each of which receives it in a different register: as labor, as recognition, as inheritance, and — in the first episode — as routine.

Episode I: The Seam Between the Hair Highlights and the Switch

The first episode’s formal achievement is continuity of register. The domestic scenes and the execution scene are presented in the same visual world: ordinary rooms, ordinary light, ordinary pacing. The political condition is registered as a seam — the point where the hair highlights and the switch belong to the same day, the same man, the same visual world. This is an inference from the plot summary, which gives no indication of a register change between the domestic scenes and the execution scene, and from the film’s stated formal logic; a frame-accurate description of the final sequence is not available in the retrieved sources.

This is the film’s central formal argument, and it is easy to miss because it is an argument made by withholding. The execution is not depicted as atrocity. It is depicted as employment. Heshmat’s reluctance is visible — the retrieved plot summary notes he drives to work “with visible reluctance” — but reluctance is not refusal. The film’s political evidence is the continuity between the family man and the executioner, not the discontinuity.

Rasoulof has described the film’s theme in terms that support this reading without dictating it. He told the BBC that he wanted to talk about “people who push responsibility away from themselves and say that the decision is taken by higher powers,” and that “they can actually say no, and that’s their strength” (BBC News, 29 February 2020). In an interview with Film Comment, he said: “These stories are not about execution. I wanted to focus on the question of responsible actions with regard to whether one obeys or disobeys the orders of a totalitarian power” (Film Comment, 2020).

The first episode is the film’s baseline: a man who has not yet said no, whose home is intact, whose day is ordinary, and whose hand is on the switch. The other three episodes are variations on what saying no costs, and what it redistributes.

Episode II: The Execution as Labor and Bargaining

The second episode moves the execution from the button to the barracks. Pouya, a conscript, is assigned to kill a man and has one hour to get transferred. The retrieved plot summary describes him and his bunkmates debating the moral issues of military service, and a fellow soldier offering to take his place for fifty million toman to support his sick sister. Another bunkmate argues that the payment will not stop the execution and that Pouya remains culpable.

The formal shift is from mechanism to negotiation. In Episode I, the execution is a button pressed by a man alone in a room. In Episode II, it is a task distributed across a dormitory, debated, priced, and refused. The execution has not moved closer to being shown; it has moved closer to being argued. The political condition is registered as the conversion of state killing into a problem of labor and exchange — who does the work, what it costs, who can be paid to take it.

Rasoulof’s Film Comment interview notes that the dormitory conversations contrast with the visual rhythm of the surrounding sequences, and that the director defended dialogue as part of cinematic language. The formal point is not that the film becomes talky. It is that the execution, having been withheld as image in Episode I, returns as speech in Episode II — as something that can be discussed, priced, and refused in a room full of conscripts.

Episode III: The Execution as a Face in a Photograph

The third episode is the film’s structural counter-image to the first. Javad, a young man finishing his service, arrives at his girlfriend Nana’s birthday party. He learns that a family friend and political activist, Keyvan, has recently died. Then he sees a photograph and realizes that he executed Keyvan for a few days off to see Nana on her birthday.

The formal move is recognition, not depiction. The execution returns not as a button, not as a barracks debate, but as a face in a photograph in a family room. The political cost is paid in a domestic space — a birthday party, a dinner, a song — and the execution is present only as the thing that the photograph reveals.

This is the episode that most clearly demonstrates the film’s distributive logic. The execution is not shown. It is recognized. The plot summary gives no indication of a flashback to the killing, and the film’s formal logic suggests the camera stays in the room where the recognition happens. The political condition is registered as the moment when a man understands that his ordinary domestic life — his desire to see his girlfriend on her birthday — is continuous with the state’s killing, and that the continuity is not abstract but photographic.

The retrieved plot summary notes that Nana considers attacking Javad with a rock but instead asks that he not tell her family, and that her father memorializes Keyvan during the birthday dinner while she cries. The execution has been redistributed into a family gathering, and the family gathering cannot absorb it. The episode ends with Nana leaving Javad. The execution has cost him the domestic space he wanted to preserve.

Episode IV: The Execution as Inheritance

The fourth episode moves the execution from recognition to inheritance. Darya, a university student, visits her aunt and uncle, Zaman and Bahram, at their country home. Bahram is terminally ill. He and Darya debate whether to kill a fox to protect his chickens; she says she would avoid doing so. Zaman eventually tells Darya that Bahram is her real father. While Darya packs to leave, they argue, and it is revealed that Bahram had to disband his family for their safety after escaping his order to execute a prisoner, sending Darya to be raised by Mansour.

The formal decision here is to make refusal a household structure rather than a heroic gesture. Bahram’s refusal is not shown as a moment of defiance; it is shown as the reason the household was dissolved and reconstituted. The execution is present as the thing that was refused, and the refusal is present as the shape of Darya’s life — a father she did not know, a family she did not grow up in, a visit to a country house where the truth is finally told.

The fox and chicken debate is the episode’s way of making the refusal concrete without making it heroic. Darya says she would not kill the fox. Bahram’s chickens are at stake. The debate is domestic, small, and unresolved in the way that ordinary moral arguments are unresolved. The execution is not the subject of the debate; it is the background against which the debate becomes legible as a rehearsal of a larger refusal.

Rasoulof told Film Comment that the fourth story was not autobiographical, but that his daughter’s questions ignited his attempts to write it, and that his intention was “to simultaneously show the difficulty and the beauty of saying no.” The formal reading — refusal as inheritance rather than heroism — is my interpretation, not the director’s stated intent. But it is consistent with the episode’s structure: the execution is distributed into a family tree, and the refusal is distributed into a daughter’s visit.

What the Distribution Argues

The film’s politics are carried by placement, not depiction. The execution is never the scene. It is the off-screen event that each episode’s domestic space is organized around. Episode I ends at the switch. Episodes II, III, and IV begin after it, in its aftermath, and each one assigns the execution to a different ordinary relation: worker, conscript, guest, parent.

This is the formal evidence of the political condition the film describes. The condition is not that executions happen — the film’s audience knows that. The condition is that executions are distributed across ordinary homes, that the people who press the button and the people who debate the price and the people who recognize the face and the people who inherit the refusal are all living in the same visual and domestic register. The film’s argument is that the political condition lives in that continuity, not in a depicted atrocity.

The Berlinale’s description of the film as asking “to what extent individual freedom can be expressed under a despotic regime and its seemingly inescapable threats” is accurate but abstract. The formal reading makes it specific: freedom is expressed in the seam between the hair highlights and the switch, in the barracks debate, in the photograph at the birthday party, in the fox and chicken argument at the country house. The film distributes the execution across four ordinary homes because the execution is not an event that happens to someone else. It is an event that happens in the same rooms where people live.

The Production Condition and the Formal Reading

There is a risk in reading the four-part structure purely as aesthetic design. Rasoulof told Film Comment that the format was “a solution to get around the censorship system and the restrictions which had been forced on me by the security and intelligence organizations,” and that “when you have fewer days than usual for shooting, there are fewer dangers involved in secretly making your film.” The four-part structure is documented as a production and censorship workaround.

This does not invalidate the formal reading. It complicates it. The workaround is the condition under which the form was made, and the form’s distributive logic — four households, four registers, one off-screen execution — is legible as both a response to that condition and a formal argument about it. The film was made in secret, in fewer days than usual, under the threat of prison. The four-part structure allowed it to be made. The distribution of the execution across four homes is what the structure does.

What the sources do not support is any claim that Rasoulof’s biography directly explains a specific formal choice in a specific episode. The sources support general statements about censorship, responsibility, and the conditions of production. They do not support scene-level causation. The formal reading I have offered is an interpretation of the film’s structure, not a report of the director’s intentions.

The Limits of the Reading

The retrieved plot summary states that Heshmat “presses a button that hangs several condemned prisoners.” It does not state that the hanging is shown. The off-screen reading is an inference from the summary and from the film’s formal logic, not a frame-accurate description of the final sequence. A frame-accurate description would strengthen the argument, but it is not available in the retrieved sources.

Similarly, the claim that the four episodes are connected spatially rather than causally is my interpretation. The Berlinale describes a “loose narrative link” and says the stories are “tragically and inexorably connected.” It does not specify the nature of the connection. The spatial reading is consistent with the festival’s description and with the plot summary, but it is not the festival’s stated reading.

These limits matter because the film’s formal decisions are the evidence, and evidence should be described precisely. The execution is withheld as spectacle. The four episodes distribute its consequences across four ordinary homes. The switch-press in Episode I is the hinge. These are formal observations supported by the retrieved sources and by the film’s structure. The political reading — that the distribution is the argument — is an interpretation, and it should be labeled as such.

FAQ

Is the execution shown on screen in the first episode?

The retrieved plot summary states that Heshmat “presses a button that hangs several condemned prisoners.” It does not describe the hanging as shown. The film’s formal logic — the continuity of domestic and execution registers — suggests the execution is withheld as spectacle, but a frame-accurate description is not available in the retrieved sources.

Are the four episodes connected by shared characters?

No. The Berlinale describes only a “loose narrative link” between the stories. The retrieved plot summary lists separate casts for each episode. The connection is thematic and structural, not causal.

Why did Rasoulof use a four-part structure?

Rasoulof told Film Comment that the format was “a solution to get around the censorship system and the restrictions which had been forced on me by the security and intelligence organizations,” and that fewer shooting days meant fewer dangers in secretly making the film. He also said the format was “a great opportunity to look at stories from different angles.”

What does the film say about responsibility?

Rasoulof told the BBC that he wanted to talk about “people who push responsibility away from themselves and say that the decision is taken by higher powers,” and that “they can actually say no, and that’s their strength.” In Film Comment, he said: “These stories are not about execution. I wanted to focus on the question of responsible actions with regard to whether one obeys or disobeys the orders of a totalitarian power.”

Did the film win any awards?

The film won the Golden Bear for Best Film at the 70th Berlin International Film Festival in February 2020. Rasoulof was unable to attend the award ceremony because he was banned from leaving Iran; his daughter Baran Rasoulof, who stars in the film, accepted the prize on his behalf (Berlin International Film Festival, 2020 programme).

Sources

• Berlin International Film Festival. “Sheytan vojud nadarad | There Is No Evil | Es gibt kein Böses.” 2020 programme. https://www.berlinale.de/en/2020/programme/202006819.html
• BBC News. “Berlin International Film Festival: Iranian film about executions wins top prize.” 29 February 2020. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-51693417
• Film Comment. “Interview: Mohammad Rasoulof on There Is No Evil.” 2020. https://www.filmcomment.com/interview-mohammad-rasoulof-there-is-no-evil
• Wikipedia. “There Is No Evil.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9Eeytan_Yoktur (plot summary; used for episode descriptions, with the caveat that it is a tertiary source)