The Salesman (2016)
★★★½ — The Salesman (2016)
Asghar Farhadi's The Salesman arrived in 2016 as one of the more anticipated foreign-language releases of the year, not least because it went on to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, adding to the Oscar the Iranian director had already collected for A Separation five years earlier. Co-produced between Iran, France and Qatar through Memento Production, ARTE France Cinéma and Farhadi's own production outfit, the film sits comfortably within the tradition of socially grounded Iranian cinema, a lineage that stretches back through decades of quietly observational filmmaking. If you have any interest in that broader tradition, the blog has covered a few touchstones worth your time, including Salaam Cinema and The House Is Black, both of which give useful context for where Iranian cinema has come from.
The film follows Emad and Rana, a married couple and amateur theatre performers in Tehran who are forced to relocate when their apartment block becomes unsafe due to construction work on a neighbouring building. Their hastily arranged new flat comes with complications, among them the murky history of the previous tenant, a history that intrudes on their lives in a way neither could have anticipated. Farhadi, who also wrote the screenplay, structures the film partly around a production of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman that Emad and Rana are rehearsing throughout, and the echoes between Miller's themes of masculine pride and fractured identity and the couple's own unravelling situation are hardly accidental. It is the kind of literary scaffolding Farhadi handles with a fairly light touch, allowing it to inform the atmosphere rather than announce itself too loudly.
The two leads carry a great deal of weight between them. Shahab Hosseini, who took the Best Actor prize at Cannes for this role, plays Emad as a man whose composure is slowly consumed by something he cannot quite name, whether it is righteous anger or wounded ego. Taraneh Alidoosti, one of Iran's most recognised screen presences and a regular Farhadi collaborator, plays Rana with a restrained intensity that asks a lot of the viewer's attention. Babak Karimi, Mina Sadati and Mehdi Koushki fill out a cast that, in typical Farhadi fashion, feels less like a collection of supporting players and more like a world of people with their own agendas and pressures. The film runs to 125 minutes and earns its classification as both drama and thriller, operating somewhere in the space between the two, more interested in psychological tension than plot mechanics. For another drama operating in that slow-burn register, it is worth comparing notes with Fargo (1996), a very different film in tone and method but one that similarly uses domestic disruption to expose uncomfortable questions about the people at its centre.
A-Z World Movie Tour Qatar Asghar Farhadi’s The Salesman is tense, smart, and quietly devastating, just like A Separation, which I absolutely loved. So I went in with high hopes, and while it didn’t quite reach those heights, it’s still a gripping drama that pulls you in with its moral complexity and slow-burning anger. The story of a couple dealing with trauma after an attack in their home spirals into something much bigger, about guilt, revenge, and how pride can destroy even the closest relationships. It’s classic Farhadi. Real people, impossible choices, no easy answers. That said, I couldn’t help but feel the focus shifted too much onto the husband, Emad, while Rana, the wife, gets pushed into the background just when her perspective matters most. She’s clearly shaken, but we don’t get to see enough of her inner world. Her fear, her silence, what she wants. Instead, Emad’s need for justice (or is it pride?) takes over, and the film starts to feel more like his journey than theirs. It’s a small shift, but it makes a difference. The pacing is also tough at times, very slow, with scenes that could’ve been tighter. It’s maybe 20 to 30 minutes too long without adding much. But even with that, the tension never fully drops, and the final moments are quietly powerful. Not as sharp as A Separation, but still a strong, thoughtful film.
For me, that tonal imbalance around Rana is the thing that stays with me longest after the credits roll, not in a satisfying way but in a nagging one. There is a film here that could have been even more unsettling if it had trusted her silence as much as it trusts Emad's noise. Still, Farhadi's control of atmosphere and his refusal to offer the audience any comfortable moral exit are things few filmmakers working today can match. If The Salesman is a slight step down from the precision of its predecessor, it is still operating at a level well above most of what turns up in the drama section on any given Friday night. Sometimes "not quite his best" is still pretty good company to be in.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 2016 | Watched: 2025-08-25
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for The Salesman (2016) on YouTube
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from Asghar Farhadi: A Separation (2011)
More from Iran: The House Is Black (1963) · A Separation (2011) · A Few Cubic Meters of Love (2014)
More from the 2010s: Wonder (2017) · Beautiful Boy (2018) · The Witch (2015) · What We Do in the Shadows (2014)
More drama: Viy (1967) · Wonder (2017) · A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Beautiful Boy (2018)
More thriller: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Angst (1983) · The Long Walk (2025) · Punishment Park (1971)
