It rains in Iran. It teems, it seems, in Tehran.

Precipitation seems to be perennial in Mani Haghighi’s subversive, twisty SUBTRACTION.

It’s pouring at the start of the picture when Farzaneh (Taraneh Alidoosti) spots a man on a city bus who looks an awful lot like her husband, Jalal (Navid Mohammadzadeh). Under the impression that he is away on business, she follows him to an unfamiliar building. There, she sees the residents greet him as if they know him and watches from the street as he enters an apartment to meet with another woman.

 

Three months pregnant, suffering anxiety issues and more than a little distracted in her job as a driving instructor, could it be that the rain is blurring her vision, the torrent conjuring tormenting illusions?

Confronting him when he arrives home, he’s adamant about his alibi, steadfast in his stance that he was miles away at the time. Unable to disbelieve what she saw with her own eyes, she visits the building and makes an unsettling discovery about the man on the bus.

The woman is a spitting image of her. To further complicate matters, we discover that her husband is a doppleganger of Jalal. Yet their personalities are far from similar.

Haghighi says: “Living in a theocracy splits you in two. You must become two people to survive. A private life, and a public mask. The split seeps into the narrowest crevices of your life, and your every cell produces a simulacrum of itself: a copy that looks just like you. You produce this copy to protect yourself from the brutality around you, but it can turn against you and destroy you.

I always wanted to make a film about this doubling, and the catastrophes it creates around me. I wanted to make a film about the atmosphere of Tehran: Not the explicitly political film that tackles issues head-on, but a film about the mood of this city, how it feels for us to live here, all of us, together with our doubles.”

SUBTRACTION is a surreal thriller of double lives, double cross and double indemnity. Off to the box office, on the double!