‘Opponent’ Review: A Refugee Turns to Wrestling in a Sharp, Stressful Social Thriller
variety.comGuy Lodge Film Critic It’s striking how often the word “removal” comes up in various governments’ official policies regarding refugees and asylum seekers — a pointedly chosen term that conjures images of inanimate refuse or clutter awaiting collection, rather than human lives in desperate limbo.
Fail to make your case to officials and you’ll be “removed,” a near-literally humanizing threat that hangs over Milad Alami’s tense, bristling social thriller “Opponent” like a pounding migraine.
Following an Iranian wrestler and father whose urgent reasons for fleeing his homeland emerge aren’t entirely what he claims them to be, this is a tightly wound affair that unravels an obscured past and an uncertain future neatly in tandem.
Alami maintains suspense at both ends of his narrative without making a blank cypher of his protagonist, played with seething specificity by an electrifying Payman Maadi.
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