The Salesman

Asghar Farhadi's The Salesman (Forushande) won the Cannes Best Screenplay and Best Actor (Shahab Hosseini) prizes in 2016, and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2017, Farhadi's second Oscar in the category, after A Separation. Farhadi declined to attend the 2017 ceremony in protest at the Trump administration's executive order banning travel from Iran; his absence was widely covered as one of the most articulate political statements of that year's awards season.

A young Tehran couple, Emad and Rana (Hosseini and Taraneh Alidoosti), are forced to vacate their apartment when the building begins to subside. They move to a flat the previous tenant of which (a woman whose profession is gradually disclosed) has left some belongings. One evening, Rana is assaulted in the apartment by a stranger; she refuses to call the police. Emad, an English-literature teacher rehearsing the title role in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, begins his own quiet investigation, which slowly hardens into something neither marriage nor moral framework can survive.

The film's structural masterstroke is the parallel between the staged Miller play (the failures of an ageing American salesman) and the unfolding domestic catastrophe. Farhadi's command of contemporary Iranian middle-class moral drama (established in About Elly, perfected in A Separation) operates here at its most compressed and most emotionally exposed.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: Farhadi's most precise chamber drama, and one of the great recent films about how grief and humiliation can corrupt good men. The closing scene is among the most quietly devastating in 21st-century cinema.