THE STORY – Roya, an Iranian teacher imprisoned in Tehran’s Evin Prison for her political beliefs, is faced with a choice: make a forced televised confession or remain confined to her three-square-metre cell. As past and present slip out of sequence and exchange places, she moves between inner landscapes and lived experience.
THE CAST – Melisa Sözen, Maryam Palizban, Hamidreza Djavdan, Mohammad Ali Hosseinalipour & Bacho Meburishvili
THE TEAM – Mahnaz Mohammadi (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 92 Minutes
Authoritarian regimes don’t always announce themselves through spectacle. More often, they work quietly, grinding people down through repetition, isolation, and the slow distortion of time. “Roya,” the latest drama from Iranian filmmaker and women’s rights activist Mahnaz Mohammadi, is built around that idea. Rather than staging resistance as a series of overt acts, the film focuses on how power reshapes perception itself, eroding memory, identity, and even the language through which dissent might be expressed.
The setup is brutally concise. Roya (Melisa Sözen) is an Iranian teacher imprisoned for her political beliefs and held in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison. She is given a choice that is no choice at all: record a televised confession that publicly dismantles her convictions or remain locked indefinitely in a three-square-metre cell. From that point on, the narrative refuses linearity. Time fractures. Past and present overlap. What unfolds is less a procedural account of incarceration than a subjective study of how prolonged isolation dismantles a person’s internal coherence.
For much of its opening stretch, the film aligns itself almost entirely with Roya’s point of view. The camera becomes her eyes as she traces the walls of her cell, the light flickering as her breathing grows increasingly unsteady. Blindfolded, she sees only her feet as she stumbles through identical corridors that seem designed to disorient rather than lead anywhere. Men strike her and calmly explain that she will not leave alive. At one point, she is urged to take her own life. Cockroaches crawl across the floor and into her food. A doctor secretly feeds her so she will be physically capable of sitting upright in front of a camera. None of this is staged for shock value. The violence is methodical, procedural, almost administrative. Exhaustion itself becomes the instrument of control.
When the frame finally widens, the effect is unsettling rather than liberating. Roya is suddenly outside, riding in a car through streets filled with music and dancing. Surveillance persists. Roads are blocked. Permissions are required. The film suggests that since the pandemic, the architecture of control has only tightened, embedding itself more deeply into everyday life. Roya is told her father is dying and later learns this was a lie. She is told her sister is alive and later discovers she is not. Truth is dispensed strategically, not to clarify but to destabilize. Freedom, when it appears, is conditional and easily revoked.
Sözen carries the film almost entirely through physical presence. Roya never speaks a single word. Her silence is not symbolic so much as symptomatic, the result of trauma that has rendered language unreliable. She stares forward as others speak to her, explain her situation, or frame cooperation as an act of self-preservation. In these moments, the film’s political intelligence sharpens. Even outside the prison, articulation is demanded on institutional terms. Silence becomes suspicious. Compliance is reframed as care.
Mohammadi’s direction is controlled and unsentimental. Shot underground without official permission, the project mirrors the conditions it depicts. The viewer is asked to assemble meaning alongside Roya, piecing together the reality of contemporary Iran through omission, contradiction, and delay. It’s an approach that implicates the audience, recreating the slow realization of living under a system where lies are normalized and clarity is perpetually deferred. Resistance here is not a rallying cry but a matter of endurance.
That same rigor, however, can become constraining. The repeated returns to first-person perspective start to feel schematic, and the temporal dislocations accumulate faster than they can emotionally register. By the time the opening scenes are revisited from an external viewpoint near the end, the conceptual logic is clear, but the payoff is uneven. What’s meant to feel like convergence sometimes plays as clarification after the fact. There’s also a sense that the film is carrying more thematic weight than it can fully support. Political sacrifice, familial obligation, moral compromise, and psychological survival are all introduced quickly and not always given room to deepen. The restraint that gives the film its severity also creates a distance that may keep some viewers at arm’s length.
“Roya” understands that authoritarianism rarely relies solely on visible brutality, but on the slow erosion of certainty and selfhood. Mohammadi refuses catharsis or resolution, offering instead a portrait of survival defined by silence. The result is rigorous, unsettling, and often compelling, even if it never fully becomes the devastating statement it reaches for.
