Title: The Bora
Foreign Title: Sardbad
Year: 2024
Country: Iran
Language: In Farsi with English subtitles
Director: Mohammad Esmaeili
“Four members of the Sarab mountaineering team made the winter ascent of the Takht-e-Sulaiman Massif. Only one of them managed to return to the base unharmed. The team’s leader didn’t go missing – he was murdered.”
And so, begins our film; with white text on a black background, director Muhammad Esmaeili lays down a premise that is bound to capture our attention and makes no bones about the genre he “submits for our approval” – a complex murder mystery. Esmaeili’s debut feature is a film noir clothed in the classic tradition of films like Lady in the Lake, The Blair Witch Project and The Diving Bell and The Butterfly, etc. Shot from the perspective of the chief investigator, almost the entire film is seen across the desk or table of the interview taking place. Every possible actor in this drama sits or stands across from our camera’s intense fixed frame, gently zooming out in the single take that will contain a clue to solving the mystery.
The title Bora means storm, which could also be a metaphor for dispensing to the viewer fact upon fact and, naturally, some subtle misdirection. Each interview – and the film is structured as a litany of interviews, one after another after another – presents a participant in a strict frontal view, ostensibly telling the “truth” about the circumstances surrounding death of its leader and each of these fixed frame “scenes” ends with a black frame, punctuating the end of the interview with the same musical exclamation.
One wonders whether the killing is linked to a romantic situation and, sure enough, the character who shares his name with the treacherous mountain, namely Sulaiman, was connected to a house fire that caused the tragic death of his sister who may have been the victim of what appeared to be an honour killing but some still considered self-immolation. As the plot swerves away from the mountain to the circumstances of the girl’s death, we learn much more, about all these men who had been close friends in their youth and the resentments that emerge, one by one, before the inevitable revelation that Esmaeili saves for the surprise ending.
The viewer must be glued to the subtitles from the first “interview” to the last in order not to miss a critical clue to solving the mystery which could tie the supposed “honour killing” of an innocent girl to the storm that hid the body of a friend. Not for the attention deficient.
