Highlights

Subtraction

Tafrigh

Swiss Premiere

Mani Haghighi

Iran, France

Somber doppelganger thrills

2022, 107'

VO. Farsi

ST. English

With

Taraneh Alidoosti, Navid Mohammadzadeh, Esmail PoorReza

It's a rainy day in Tehran. A woman believes she's spotted her husband entering another woman's house. A couple is thrown suddenly into a strange encounter. Science fiction meets the bizarre in this jarring Iranian thriller.

"Tafrigh" translates both as "subtraction" (mathematics) and "differentiation". In Iran's theocracy, one is required to live a double life, one private and one public face. We are familiar with screenwriter, actor and filmmaker Mani Haghighi's taste for the absurd. He surprises us once again with a hallucinatory work in the guise of a puzzle. A long-standing project inspired by an encounter with his own doppelganger via a photograph of a wounded soldier. In Tehran under an endless downpour, as in a dream, a couple will meet their lookalikes. This seemingly impossible and inexplicable event teleports us into a brilliant psychological thriller. In this tense - Hitchcockian - mirror, the reflection of a schizophrenic society. A remarkable film carried by the incomparable Taraneh Alidoosti.
Gaëlle Vidalie

Direction

Mani Haghighi

Screenplay

Mani Haghighi, Amir Reza Koohestani

Image

Morteza Najafi

Editing

Meysam Molaei

Sound

Amir Hossein Ghasemi

Music

Ramin Kousha