Film

The Salesman

Name: The Salesman
Genre: Drama, Thriller
Released: 2016
Cast: Shahab Hosseini, Taraneh Alidoosti, Babak Karimi, Mina Sadati, Mehdi Koushki

A married couple's ordinary life is upended when Rana, alone in their new Tehran flat, becomes the victim of a violent intrusion — an act she and her husband Emad can barely name, let alone report. As the two rehearse a production of Death of a Salesman, the line between performance and real life blurs, and the film becomes a slow, devastating study of shame, honour and what a marriage can survive. Tense, deliberate, and quietly merciless.

TMDb rating

7.3

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The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Death of a Salesman1985

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Dustin Hoffman's towering TV performance of the very Arthur Miller play Emad and Rana are rehearsing throughout The Salesman — watching it lets you feel exactly what they're channelling onstage each night.

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But Colder and more satirical in places — it has a dry humour The Salesman never reaches for.

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A crime thriller about how far a decent man will go once violated, tracking the same slide from victimhood into moral compromise, though pitched as pure genre suspense.

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Rashomon1950

Both films use a single ambiguous incident to expose how honour and self-protection warp the truth people are willing to tell.

Kurosawa's landmark tells the same story four contradictory ways, interrogating how shame and self-interest distort testimony — the exact fog Emad and Rana get lost in.

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Death Wish1974

Same inciting wound — a violent home invasion against a wife — but where Farhadi asks agonised moral questions, this asks none at all, showing what the genre looks like with the brakes off.

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