The title is a philosophical lie, a trap set for the viewer. There Is No Evil (Sheytan vojud nadarad), Mohammad Rasoulof tells us, and then proceeds for 150 minutes to show us exactly where it lurks: not in the dramatic gestures of monsters, but in everyday bureaucracy, in the signing of a document, in a salary being credited, in the pressing of a button before dawn. It is a cinematic samizdat, an indictment smuggled out of a system that has condemned its author to silence and prison. The Golden Bear won in Berlin in 2020, withdrawn in absentia while the director was (and is) a political prisoner, is not just an award; it is recognition that this is cinema of absolute necessity, a work whose very existence is an act of moral resistance. Rasoulof does not offer us a pamphlet, but a treatise on obedience, a moral fractal in four parts that explores the same, excruciating question: how much does it cost, in grams of soul, to pull that trigger?

The structure of the film is its first stroke of genius. It is an anthology, an episodic film that rejects traditional narrative unity in favor of an overwhelming thematic unity. It is Kieślowski's Decalogue condensed into a single, inescapable commandment: Thou shalt not kill. But if the Polish masterpiece was a metaphysical exploration of death in an era of thaw, Rasoulof's is an urgent X-ray of complicity in an era of oppression. Each vignette is a variation on the theme of the death penalty, not as an abstract concept, but as a job. The film never shows us the “System,” the judges, the politicians. It shows us only its smallest and most replaceable cogs: the executors. It is an almost clinical dissection of Hannah Arendt's “banality of evil,” where horror is not an aberration, but a routine. The first story is a masterpiece of misdirection: we follow a man, Heshmat, in his daily life. He is a loving father, a caring husband. We see him shopping, going to the bank, picking up his wife. It is a portrait of almost boring normality, until the final twist reveals the nature of his night job, illuminated by a cold green light. The ordinary man is the executioner. His normality is not the mask of evil; it is its most terrifying symptom.

The film is a progressive descent from passive complicity to active rebellion, and a mapping of its consequences. If the first segment shows us who accepts the task, the second throws us into the panic of those who must choose. It is the story closest to a thriller: a young conscript, Pouya, in a claustrophobic dormitory, shared with other comrades, all terrified because their turn to “pull the stool” is approaching. Rasoulof masterfully captures the panic, the moral claustrophobia, the desperate search for an escape route. His is not an ideological rebellion, but a visceral conscientious objection, a ‘I can't’ that is more physical than ethical. The dilemma is ruthless: to save a stranger, he must destroy his own life (desert, lose his girlfriend, become a pariah). The system, Rasoulof tells us, does not allow for neutrality; it forces the individual to make an impossible choice between his own survival and his own humanity.

The last two stories explore the “after,” the life that follows the choice. The third episode, about another soldier (Javad) who chose to flee for love, blends romance with tragedy. He said “no” to execution, but that “no” infects everything. His act of moral integrity makes him a fugitive, unable to even participate in the mourning of his beloved's family. His purity has made him an outcast. It is a painful echo of Antigone itself: the law of the heart versus the law of the state, where following the former means being buried alive by the latter. But it is in the fourth and final chapter that Rasoulof achieves his most powerful synthesis, shifting the aesthetic from oppressive urban realism to a pastoral lyricism reminiscent of Kiarostami. Two young people, arriving from Germany, visit their uncle Bahram, a doctor who lives in self-imposed exile in a remote, almost primitive countryside. Here, the truth explodes like a mine. The “uncle” is not who he says he is. His entire existence is a fiction built on a “no” uttered decades earlier. The act of disobedience is not a heroic moment, but a life sentence. The evil that the state commits is not only execution; it is the lie that forces its citizens to live, a contamination that is passed on like a toxic inheritance.

There is No Evil is a work built on a paradox: it is a formally rigorous and controlled film about the total loss of control; it is a work of fiction that possesses the urgency and truth of a documentary. Rasoulof rejects easy rhetoric. There are no spotless heroes, no executioners with horns. There are only human beings trapped in a machine that asks them to dehumanize their neighbors in order to remain human themselves. Using different genres—family drama, barracks thriller, tragic love story, rural mystery—Rasoulof demonstrates how a single political edict can infect every aspect of life. It is a film that does not raise its voice, but its surgical precision in engraving the collective consciousness is deafening. It is the testimony of an artist who, deprived of freedom, used cinema as his only remaining freedom.