The Hollywood Reporter by Deborah Young
Though the message comes across loud and clear, the four tales suffer from being narratively uneven, making the film’s two-and-a-half-hour running time seem long indeed.
✭ ✭ ✭ ✭ Read critic reviews
Germany, Iran, Czech Republic · 2020
2h 31m
Director Mohammad Rasoulof
Starring Mahtab Servati, Shaghayegh Shourian, Baran Rasoulof, Darya Moghbeli
Genre Drama
Please login to add films to your watchlist.
Shot in secret and smuggled out of Iran, this anthology film comprises four stories of men responsible for implementing capital punishment. Whether they choose to accept to defy their orders will affect their relationships, and their consciences, and the rest of their lives.
The Hollywood Reporter by Deborah Young
Though the message comes across loud and clear, the four tales suffer from being narratively uneven, making the film’s two-and-a-half-hour running time seem long indeed.
Slant Magazine by Diego Semerene
The film grapples with the various shapes that guilt and honor (or lack thereof) might take in a context of state-sanctioned death.
Not since A Short Film About Killing has a filmmaker produced such a thrilling case against capital punishment, an enraging, enthralling, enduring testament to the oppressed.
The movie provokes the wonder and terror of what it means to live in a world where every resolution brings new questions, and the prospects that a happy ending might carry the greatest risk of all.
RogerEbert.com by Godfrey Cheshire
The pleasures of watching There Is No Evil—a title that grows more piercingly ironic as the film progresses—are considerable.
Although There Is No Evil is a brave and impassioned work, the seams show.
There Is No Evil comes across as four films for the price of one, none of its segments anemic, and each contributing fresh insights to the paradoxes of capital punishment in Iran.
Los Angeles Times by Robert Abele
When juxtaposed against a history of Iranian cinema that has often relied on child-centric allegory and non-specific narrative to make its societal critiques, There Is No Evil practically blisters with the intensity of specifically living in Iran as it exists now, as a state once believed to carry out the most executions of any country outside China.
The A.V. Club by Roxana Hadadi
The film’s as compassionate as it is unsettling, and as provocative as it is poignant.
Austin Chronicle by Steve Davis
The Iranian production There is No Evil (Persian title: Satan Doesn’t Exist) may not revive the portmanteau film to its former glory (the comic 1963 Italian Oscar-winning trilogy Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow being a stellar example), but it’s a comparatively solid quartet of short films that critically examine the country’s dehumanizing system of capital punishment, putting a human face on the citizen-executioner asked to carry out the all-too-frequently enacted death penalty.
In the bowels of France
German film star Veronika Voss becomes a drug addict at the mercy of corrupt Dr. Marianne Katz, who keeps her supplied with morphine.
Two moles tasked with infiltration struggle to expose one another.
Family secrets are laid bare.
A quasi-matriarchal community inhabiting a winery is threatened by Japanese invaders.
A struggling family turns to gig work, which quickly creates more problems than solutions.
A Serbian man fights to regain custody of his children.
A Russian immigrant works as a masseur in Poland and becomes a guru-like figure to his wealthy clients.
Takumi and his village are slowly convinced to allow a company to develop a glamping site, unaware of the consequences that will follow.