𝙳𝚒𝚌𝚝𝚊𝚝𝚘𝚛'𝚜 𝙵𝚛𝚎𝚎𝚍𝚘𝚘𝚖

𝙵𝚊𝚕𝚕𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝙷𝚘𝚞𝚜𝚎

𝙳𝚒𝚛𝚎𝚌𝚝𝚎𝚍 𝚋𝚢 𝙼𝚘𝚑𝚜𝚎𝚗 𝙶𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚊𝚎𝚒

𝚅𝚎𝚗𝚒𝚌𝚎 𝙵𝚒𝚕𝚖 𝙵𝚎𝚜𝚝𝚒𝚟𝚊𝚕 𝟸𝟶𝟸𝟼

Before showing us a single image, the film makes power audible. We hear a doctor addressing his young patient with the informal pronoun to—a small linguistic choice that erases professional distance and signals a displacement of boundaries. He is a surgeon who demands an additional payment from patients for their treatment, a cost that, for people experiencing poverty, often means selling their possessions and exhausting all their financial resources. The forced intimacy of his language and his demand for money both stem from a sense of entitlement conferred by his professional position.

From this opening conversation, Mohsen Gharaei traces a path that moves from the doctor’s office to the prison, and from the prison to the home. The same system that allows a surgeon to extract additional money from a poor patient also pushes a financially desperate correctional officer toward accepting a small bribe. Both believe that their abilities and labour are inadequately compensated. The difference lies only in their position and in the outward appearance of the act.

Wherever a system cultivates self-importance and a sense of immunity, it also opens the door to corruption and infiltration. Once people believe their position places them beyond accountability, a minor privilege can become an entry point into a vast network of corruption. Theft and bribery are dispersed across institutions as a series of everyday transgressions, allowing them to appear ordinary while concealing their true source.

From the beginning, the images reveal a deteriorating house and a family trapped in financial hardship. This does not present Rashid as innocent, but as a man in need who has accepted a small bribe and been exposed. He is neither a thief nor a professional criminal. He is an ordinary person whose poverty, needs and occupation have placed him in a vulnerable position.

Rashid does not conform to the familiar image of a brutal correctional officer. He is physically imposing, yet appears calm and compassionate. He helps prisoners, gives them extra food and considers their prayers a sufficient reward. These very qualities make him useful to the structure of power: he is obedient, needy and easy to direct. His trust or vulnerability can be exploited, and when a crisis occurs, responsibility can be placed upon his shoulders.

The system turns ordinary people into executioners and bribe-takers so thoroughly that Rashid does not even regard kicking away the stool beneath a condemned prisoner as immoral or inhuman—and still refuses to recognize himself as an executioner.

Authoritarian systems select people for certain positions whose psychological and economic characteristics can be identified and exploited. Such individuals follow a recognizable pattern within the machinery of power. The system knows how to use their needs, fears, obedience or kindness and, when corruption is exposed, present them as its visible face. The hidden power strikes at the root, while the handle of the axe appears in someone else’s hands.

Rashid is part of the corruption, but he is not its source. His minor act of bribery is exposed so that the deeper layers of corruption can remain concealed. He is both an instrument of the system and a shield behind which the powerful can hide—a man selected and employed for a particular function, then sacrificed when his continued presence becomes dangerous.

The security officers' anxiety does not arise solely from a prisoner's escape. They also fear the exposure of their own misconduct, relationships and concealed information, and they want to block the path to discovery before the truth emerges. The last person in the chain of execution is seen and prosecuted, while those who gave the orders, designed the operation and made decisions behind the scenes remain outside the frame.

Once corruption has spread throughout an entire structure, its collapse no longer means the fall of a single person or official; it threatens the interests of thousands of influential figures. Each person’s survival depends on protecting the others, and these connections transform corruption into a resilient network. Under such conditions, civil resistance becomes increasingly difficult because society confronts not one dictator, but a web of interconnected interests whose members protect one another to ensure collective survival.

Farhad Aslani’s remarkable performance holds Rashid on the threshold between victimhood and violence. He is a man who has been humiliated and accused at work, whose house is about to be demolished and whose position within his family has become unstable. Through his body, face and silences, Aslani reveals how fear and helplessness can gradually become a desire to exercise power. Rashid’s path can be understood without excusing his behaviour.

Rashid receives orders in prison, but becomes the one who gives orders at home. Unable to resist those who hold power over him, he transfers the logic of the institution in which he has worked for years into his family. Prison has taught him how to define a crime, monitor a suspect, issue a verdict, lock doors and deprive others of their freedom.

Ensi, the family’s eldest daughter, has already been victimized by the same structure. Her classmates bullied her by calling her “the executioner’s daughter,” eventually forcing her to leave school. Yet the education system neither took her abuse seriously nor investigated the reasons for her departure. A system that claims to provide care and education is absent when a girl is harmed, but remains constantly present when her body, occupation and future are to be judged.

The motif of cycling subtly reveals the father’s contradictions. After leaving school, the older daughter is permitted to ride a bicycle, while the younger one still does not have the same freedom. On the one hand, Rashid wants to preserve the foundations of patriarchal order; on the other, his loving heart wants to see his daughters happy. At times, he attempts to resist his own traditional beliefs, but that resistance remains incomplete and contradictory.

Within this limited change, we can recognize the effect of the mother’s years of labour and sacrifice. Through sewing and constant work, she has carried part of the family’s burden while trying to transform the home into a different kind of space for her daughters. Ensi’s permission to cycle is a small sign that this resistance has penetrated the father’s outlook. It has not destroyed the patriarchal structure, but it has created a crack within it.

The crisis begins when Rashid discovers that Ensi intends to move to Turkey and pursue a career in modelling. He interprets her decision not as a personal choice, but as a sign of “moral corruption.” Nothing has happened yet, but his fear of what might happen is enough for him to issue a verdict. The father punishes his daughter before the supposed “crime” has even occurred.

At this moment, the home first becomes a courtroom and then a prison. Trapped in a bribery scandal and facing the prospect of losing his job, Rashid seizes power in the only territory still available to him. He defines the law, appoints himself judge and carries out the sentence, without allowing Ensi the right to choose or defend herself. The title Moragheb—meaning caretaker, guardian or watcher—thus acquires a double meaning: care may originate in love and responsibility, but within an unequal structure, it becomes surveillance, control and ownership.

Rashid genuinely loves his family, and this is precisely what makes his violence more complicated. He is not an emotionless monster, but a man incapable of separating love from authority. The structure in which he was raised has taught him that a man is responsible for protecting the family’s honour and controlling the behaviour of its women. In his mind, depriving Ensi of her freedom is not an act of violence, but the fulfilment of his paternal duty.

On the other side stand the mother and her daughters. The mother’s pain does not arise solely from Ensi’s imprisonment. She witnesses the return of the very order she has spent years trying to contain within the boundaries of the home. The man she has loved becomes, at a moment of crisis, the representative of the same power she has resisted. Her opposition is not merely an emotional defence of her daughter; it is the continuation of a long struggle to create another way of living.

The three women represent three stages in the evolution of social consciousness. The mother belongs to a generation that has preserved the family through endurance, compromise and gradual resistance. Ensi represents a generation no longer willing to sacrifice its future to such compromises and determined to take control of its own life. The younger daughter goes one step further: she regards freedom not as a distant dream but as a tangible right, and acts with instinctive courage to make it real. The differences between these three generations show that the women’s resistance is not a sudden reaction, but part of a historical journey that begins with endurance and moves toward direct action.

One of the film’s most precise symbols is a hair clip used to pass through the barbed wire and assist an escape. An object ostensibly designed to restrain a woman’s hair becomes an instrument of liberation. Barbed wire is installed along the high walls of prisons to prevent escape, and Rashid has placed the same wire above the wall surrounding the family courtyard, supposedly to prevent strangers from entering. By transforming the function of this small object, Gharaei turns the hair clip—an object associated with order and restraint—into an instrument of resistance.

The power of Moragheb lies not only in its political themes; its form also reflects power dynamics. The camera gradually withdraws from close-ups, placing the characters within increasingly confined and carefully constructed frames.

Openings and frames offer only narrow possibilities for seeing, eating and breathing. This idea culminates when Rashid uses an axe to cut an opening at the bottom of a door. He delivers food, but eliminates eye contact. His care has been reduced to keeping another person alive without granting them freedom.

This visual logic expands the parallel between the home, society and government. Inside the house, power appears through paternal control; outside, the same logic continues through demolition machinery, officials and agents of the law. The movement of the bulldozers recalls the advance of military tanks. They have not arrived merely to destroy a building; they surround the house as though it were occupied territory.

Rashid cannot resist the force taking away his job, reputation, and home, but he can lock the doors and take away the freedom of his wife and daughters. Pressure travels downward: those in power exert it upon officials, the officials exert it upon Rashid, and Rashid exerts it upon the women in his family. Within this chain, every victim can become an agent of oppression when confronted with someone less powerful.

The laughter of the drivers and law-enforcement officers during the destruction turns Rashid’s suffering into entertainment. They watch his defeat because, on this occasion, they occupy the position of power. Rashid sits on the ground before them, pouring dirt over his head like a grieving father. Aslani’s performance in this scene reveals the man’s internal collapse before the house physically falls. He mourns his home, his family, his authority and his lost self.

The mise-en-scène of this sequence also evokes the mechanism of an execution: encirclement, the issuing of an order, the presence of its executors, the observation of the condemned person’s collapse and, finally, his elimination. The correctional officer who has spent years participating in an institution of punishment now stands in the position of the condemned. External power treats him exactly as he has treated his family inside the home.

Rashid’s conflict subsequently takes a horrifying turn. The man who initially appeared to be the victim of an accusation, after establishing his own dictatorship inside the house, even considers killing a witness in the street. He has reached a point at which anyone who obstructs his power can be eliminated. The system has not merely used Rashid; it has internalized the logic of elimination within him so deeply that he now regards it as a solution to his crisis.

In the final scene, the three liberated women stand before the bulldozers while, behind them, a home filled with memories collapses over Rashid. The falling snow and the dust rising from the demolition blur the boundary between mourning and liberation. The women are free, but their freedom arrives in a space saturated with death and destruction.

Their liberation is not the outcome of justice, but the consequence of one authoritarian force entering the territory of domestic authoritarianism. The same power that destroys the house inadvertently opens the doors of the father’s prison. The women’s rescue is inseparable from the destruction of their home, as though one form of tyranny has released them from the grip of another.

Yet the film encounters a serious contradiction in its portrayal of women’s liberation. The mother and daughters resist, but the final opening of the doors is not the direct result of their actions. It comes through the arrival of the demolition machinery and Rashid’s retreat. The women’s freedom therefore remains dependent upon a change in the decision of the same man who deprived them of it. By emphasizing Rashid’s suffering and collapse, the film invites the audience to understand the oppressor, but in doing so, it risks diminishing the women’s agency and the role of their own resistance in securing their freedom.

Rashid has the opportunity to escape, but chooses to remain beneath the ruins of the house. His suicide also emerges from the logic of authoritarianism. He refuses to accept defeat and, by eliminating himself, perpetuates the cycle of violence. Although guilt and compassion may also be present in his decision—and although the mother’s efforts and the daughters’ resistance have not been without effect—he still does not know the language of dialogue, healing or transformation. He can imagine liberation only through elimination. But does the freedom of these women signify the dictator's death, or has one dictator merely been replaced by another form of power?

Suffering that is never healed, but only repressed or removed from the social body, does not disappear. It becomes the force from which another cycle of violence begins. Like energy in the laws of physics, authoritarianism is not destroyed; it is transferred from one form to another.

In Moragheb, Mohsen Gharaei connects the collapse of a house to the disintegration of a human being and a family.

Rashid is both a victim of the system and one of its agents. His minor act of bribery does not absolve him of responsibility for imprisoning his family, just as his violence should not obscure the hidden hands that have exploited his needs and vulnerabilities. Moragheb demonstrates how care becomes ownership, love becomes domination, and the home becomes a prison—and how the death of a dictator, for as long as the structure that created him remains intact, can never bring an end to dictatorship.