‘Beyond the Wall’ Review: A Grueling Guided Tour of an Iranian Police-State Nightmare

variety.com:

Jessica Kiang Nobody emerges unscathed — least of all the audience — from Vahid Jalilvand’s highly effective, deeply unpleasant “Beyond the Wall,” a morbidly violent allegory for the effects of state-sponsored trauma on the individual that places contemporary Iranian society somewhere on the map between the sixth and seventh circles of hell.

A strange combination of intricate, almost sci-fi-inflected psychological thriller, splenetic social-breakdown broadside and two-hander (torture) chamber drama, it is an exercise in bravura filmmaking applied to a story so relentlessly grim you might wish it were a little less well-made, giving you an excuse to look away.

In his 2017 film “No Date No Signature” (which won Best Director and Best Actor in Venice’s Horizons sidebar), Jalilvand pictured a stratified society teetering on the edge of legality and morality; here, however, it has toppled entirely into the abyss.

The only way is down, and the filmmaker is bringing you with it. These uncompromising intentions are signalled by an opening salvo that would surely be any other film’s brutalizing emotional nadir, as we’re introduced to Ali (“No Date, No Signature” star Navid Mohammadzadeh) in the commission of an attempted suicide.