10 / 10
Official trailer
You Are the Judge
The film opens with a husband and wife sitting side by side, talking straight into the camera. They’re arguing their case to a family court judge we never see. Simin wants a divorce because she’s secured visas to leave Iran with their eleven-year-old daughter. Nader won’t go, because his father has Alzheimer’s and can’t be left. The judge tells them their problem is too small for his court.
Farhadi puts you in the judge’s chair in the very first shot, and you stay there for two hours. Every character pleads with you. Every one of them has a point. And you’ll change your mind about who’s right more times than you’ll want to admit.
A Separation made me rethink what tension on screen requires. There’s no gun, no chase and no villain, and I can’t name a thriller that ever had me more twisted up. Each time I settled on who was right, Farhadi pulled the floor out, and I loved him for it.
For Writers
Farhadi opens with the husband and wife talking directly to an unseen judge. That’s you. In one shot he tells the audience its job for the next two hours: listen to both sides and decide.
Your opening can do the same thing. Before you introduce a single plot point, tell the reader what role they’re playing. Are they a witness, a juror, a confidant, a detective? Put them in that seat in the first scene and they’ll read every page after it through that lens. You won’t have to explain your theme once. The reader will figure it out, and readers always value the conclusions they reach themselves over the ones you hand them. My article on opening pages that hook readers goes further.
A Small Problem Gets Big
Simin moves out to her mother’s. Nader hires Razieh, a poor, devout woman from the outskirts of Tehran, to look after his father while he’s at work. She’s pregnant, she didn’t tell her husband she took the job, and she’s out of her depth from the first morning, when the old man wets himself and she has to phone a religious hotline to ask whether she’s allowed to clean him.
One day Nader comes home early to find his father tied to the bed, collapsed, and money missing from a drawer. Razieh comes back. They argue in the doorway. He pushes her out. That night she loses her baby.
One shove, one doorway, a few seconds nobody saw clearly, and for the next ninety minutes two families tear each other apart trying to decide what happened and whose fault it was. I’d put that doorway up against any plot device in modern drama. It’s tiny, and the whole film hangs off it.
Nobody Is Lying, Exactly
Did Nader know she was pregnant? He says no. Did the shove cause the miscarriage, or did something happen earlier that day? Why was the old man tied up? Where did the money go? Farhadi hands you the evidence in pieces, a conversation overheard, a teacher’s testimony, a phone call, and every piece shifts the balance.
The genius of the script is that everybody is protecting something.
Nader is protecting his pride and his daughter. Razieh is terrified of her hot-tempered husband and of her own conscience. Hodjat, the husband, is broke, humiliated and furious at a world that treats men like him like dirt. Simin wants out, and she’ll bend a little to get there. They’re all shading the truth to survive, and none of them would call it lying.
I’ve spent a career listening to people tell me their stories, and this is exactly how it works. Nobody thinks they’re the villain. Everybody leaves out whatever makes them look bad.
For Writers
Every character in A Separation is shading the truth to protect something, a daughter, a pride, a marriage, a conscience. Nobody is the villain, and the conflict is far more gripping because of it.
Villains are easy to write and easy to forget. The conflicts readers remember are the ones where two decent people want incompatible things and both of them are partly right. Write down what each of your main characters is protecting. If one of them is protecting nothing but their own wickedness, give them something real to protect, a child, a job, a reputation, and watch the story get harder and better. The reader stops rooting for a side and starts dreading the outcome, and dread keeps pages turning.
Termeh
Sarina Farhadi, the director’s own daughter, plays the daughter, Termeh, and she’s the film’s conscience. She’s eleven, smart, watchful and torn in half. She sees her father lie, and she has to decide whether to lie for him. The scene where she confronts him about it, quietly, in the kitchen, is devastating.
Farhadi keeps coming back to her face. Every adult in the film is fighting over what’s right, and she’s the one who has to live with the answer. Hell of a performance from a kid.
Class and Faith
Under the courtroom drama, the film is about class.
Nader and Simin are educated, middle-class, secular in manner. Razieh and Hodjat are poor and religious. The two families barely speak the same language, even though they share one. Hodjat’s rage at being looked down on is justified. It’s also dangerous, and Farhadi lets you feel both.
Faith matters here too, and it isn’t treated as a joke or a villain. Late in the film, the case could be settled with money, but Razieh has to swear on the Quran that she’s certain of what happened. She can’t. Her refusal costs her family money they desperately need. That choice stays with you. She won’t lie before God, even to save herself. You respect her for it, and it breaks your heart.
For Writers
Razieh won’t swear on the Quran because she isn’t certain, and that refusal costs her everything. The moral climax of the film is a woman choosing her conscience over her interest.
The best test of a character is a choice where doing the right thing costs them what they need most.
Put your character in a spot where the easy lie would fix their problem, and make them refuse, or make them take it and live with it. Either way, show what the choice costs, in money, in love, in safety. Readers will remember that scene long after they’ve forgotten your plot, because it’s the moment they found out who your character really is.
How Farhadi Shoots It
There’s no score. There’s barely any camera trickery. The film is shot handheld, in cramped apartments, stairwells, hospital corridors and a chaotic little courthouse, and it feels like you’re standing in the room while these people shout at each other. I think the missing score is the bravest choice in the film. Nothing tells you how to feel, so you’re stuck deciding for yourself, and that’s exactly the seat Farhadi wants you in.
It won the Golden Bear at Berlin and swept the acting awards there, and it won the Oscar for best foreign language film, the first Iranian film to win. It was also nominated for original screenplay, something that almost never happens for a film not in English. Every bit of that was deserved.
The Last Shot
The film ends in a courthouse corridor. The divorce is going through, and the judge has asked Termeh to choose which parent she’ll live with. She’s in the room. Her parents wait outside, not speaking, not looking at each other, as the credits roll. You never find out what she chose. Some people hate that. I think it’s perfect, and it’s the only fair way to end a film where every choice costs somebody something. Farhadi leaves you in the judge’s chair where he put you in the first shot.
The Case Against
I don’t have one. The pace is deliberate, a few viewers will call the first half slow, the subtitles will put off people who shouldn’t let them, and the lack of a clean resolution drives some audiences up the wall. None of that is a flaw.
It’s a courtroom thriller, a family drama and a portrait of a whole society, and it doesn’t waste a scene.
Craft Note
Craft Note
A Separation builds a thriller out of a single disputed moment in a doorway. Farhadi withholds what happened, parcels out the evidence, and lets every character tell their version, so the tension comes from the reader’s own shifting judgment.
You don’t need a murder to write a mystery. You need an event with real consequences, witnesses with reasons to shade the truth and a reader who cares who’s to blame. Pick one small, ambiguous moment at the center of your story. Write down what each character saw, what they say they saw and why the two are different. Then reveal those versions one at a time.
The Case for A Separation
Yes. It’s a 10 because I can’t find a wasted scene, a false note or a character I’m allowed to dismiss, and few films of its decade, from anywhere in the world, come close. It’s a gripping, humane, heartbreaking film about a divorce that turns into a trial, with no villains, no easy answers and an ending you’ll argue about for days. That ending is the part I treasure most.
