Invasion – review

Director: Shahram Mokri

Release date: 2017

Contains spoilers

This film is the third feature by Iranian auteur Shahram Mokri and it carries themes and techniques from those earlier films as well as creating a hypnotic sci-fi/noir vampire movie. It is thoroughly arthouse and, if such films are not your scene, then you may wish to turn away now. For those still with me the three films all deal with non-linear storytelling where we see the narrative in temporal loops. What this shares with Fish & Cat (2013) is that this was filmed in one take.

Abed Abest as Ali

It opens with a set on intertitles that I’ll reproduce in full: “The darkness started three years ago and the sun has gone from part of the world. To avoid illegal migrations, fences are everywhere. Lots of diseases have spread to many people. But one is especially significant to the authorities. Ali (Abed Abest) is arrested for murdering his friend, Saman. He is taken back by the police to reconstruct the murder scene.” The film takes part in a stadium and dressing room area for a sport that is never quite defined but is suggested as being one unique to the film

Ali and Negar

Ali is brought by the police in order to reconstruct the crime – in total three are dead but it is Saman, whose body is missing, that is the focus. It is suggested that Saman killed the other two team mates. It is revealed that Saman is a vampire and the team were providing blood for him but he started to demand more. To aid the reconstruction(s) Saman’s twin sister Negar (Elaheh Bakhshi) enters the masculine space of the team – an interview with Mokri indicates he chose the sport as a masculine space as it resembles Iran in that regard and he specifically wanted the disruption of putting a woman into that space.

sporting bite marks

It is quite difficult to put a synopsis together for this as it sees the reconstruction repeated but with the perspective shifting. Ali ceases to be himself in the reconstruction, his place taken by others, and he watching or collaborating as others. Negar, it is revealed, would live in a suitcase and she and Saman would trade places so, when Ali has spoken to Saman in the past, he might have been actually speaking to Negar. The demand for extra blood was to satisfy both brother and (without the team knowing it) sister. We do see two of the team with bite marks (I took these as being the murdered pair watching the investigation unfold) and Negar with blood across lips and teeth.

the worm in the pillow

One interesting side part was the primary investigator confiding to Negar that his wife was ill with some kind of unknown disease that as left her bedridden and vegetative. Negar suggests that there are worms that live in pillows that can drink blood from the sleeper’s neck and cause similar symptoms. Towards the end of the film Ali sees, through video, the investigator go to his wife and cut open her pillow. Inside is a large (pillow sized, worm – suggesting a parasite. How this ties to Saman and Negar’s vampirism is not revealed. There isn’t much in the way of lore… we do see vampiric levitation at one point and a vampire killing kit full of stakes (there is a conspiracy to do away with Negar under the noses of the police).

blood at mouth

What you get out of this film will really depend on your kinship with arthouse cinema. I found the film mesmerising and the one-shot technique was beautifully done – especially given the difficulty some of the compact spaces, and larger cast, would have presented compared to the exterior shot Fish & Cat. Some of the lighting is very well done, with greens and reds, and I can only see the interior lighting adding a further layer of difficulty to the task at hand. The technical skills on display demand 7 out of 10 as a minimum, the story is deliberately obscure, the non-linear nature of the temporal loops are something that a viewer will either enjoy or otherwise.

The imdb page is here.

On Blu-Ray @ Amazon US (part of a collection)

On Blu-Ray @ Amazon UK (part of a collection)