The Friend's House Is Here (2026)
There is a haunting doubling at the heart of The Friend's House Is Here. It is a film about young artists forced to make their work in secret, and it was itself made in secret, shot on the streets of Tehran under the nose of a regime that would never have allowed it. Once you know that, you cannot unsee it, and it lends everything a quiet, real-world bravery the drama alone would not have carried. Hossein Keshavarz and Maryam Ataei's film, which took the Special Jury Award for its ensemble at Sundance, is a warm and touching thing, even if I came away feeling it had reached for something it was never quite allowed to grasp.
It follows Pari (Mahshad Bahram) and Hanna (Hana Mana), two young women at the centre of an underground improv theatre group in Tehran. Within the little world they have built they are free. They perform, they create, they look after one another. But that freedom is permanently provisional, held together by secrecy and trust, and when their circle is exposed the whole fragile thing tilts, and the film becomes about what these two will risk for each other.
The way it was made is written into every frame. As I understand it, the outdoor scenes were caught in one or two takes, grabbed quickly before anyone official noticed, and that urgency gives the film a genuinely lived-in texture. The streets feel real because they are, and the conversations have the loose, unforced rhythm of actual friendship. But this is also where my reservations sit. You can feel the film straining against its own limits, wishing it could linger longer, stage something bigger, push a scene further, and being unable to. There is a version of this story with more room to breathe, and every so often you sense it reaching for that and having to pull back. That tension is part of what the film is, but it does leave you a little wanting.
What carries it is the warmth between the two leads. Bahram and Mana have an easy, believable closeness, and the film is at its best when it simply watches them be friends. It reminded me, of all things, of Frances Ha, that same tender attention to young women working out who they are and holding onto each other while they do it, just transposed to a context where the stakes are frighteningly higher. The standout for me is a quiet moment where Pari and Hanna stand looking out at the ocean, comforting one another. It is lovely, a pocket of stillness and space in a film that rarely gets to have either.
Three and a half stars. The Friend's House Is Here is emotive, warm and quietly courageous, and its very existence is a kind of act of defiance. If it doesn't quite land the fuller, deeper film you can feel flickering underneath, that is at least partly the price of how, and where, it had to be made, and there is something moving in that too. Worth seeking out, both for the friendship at its centre and for the bravery it took to put it on screen at all.
Reviewed from a screener provided by the film's press team. The Friend's House Is Here won the Special Jury Award for Ensemble Cast at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, and screens at the BFI London Film Festival ahead of a UK and Irish cinema release.
Related on Movies With Macca
More from Country Iran: Turtles Can Fly (2004), A Moment of Innocence (1996), Salaam Cinema (1995)
More from the 2020s: All That's Left of You (2025), The Whale (2022), Look Back (2024)
More drama: Babystar (2026), Macbeth in Compton (2026), Summer School, 2001 (2025)
