By Adam Nayman

It’s typical for the makers of thrillers to conceptualize themselves into a corner; what distinguishes veteran Iranian director Mani Haghigi’s work in Subtraction is what he does once he’s got his own back against the wall. About halfway through the film, it’s confirmed, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that married, pregnant driving instructor Farzaneh (Taraneh Alidoosti) isn’t hallucinating the biological doppelgangers of herself and her husband Jalal (Navid Mohammadzadeh) living across town; they’re real, flesh-and-blood people with different names (and a young son) whose bewilderment mirrors her own. The plot machinations that lead kind-hearted Jalal take a vicious beating on behalf of the callow, corruptible Moshen (also Mohammadzadeh) at his wife’s behest are a bit creaky, but the fallout of the substitution is authentically nightmarish for all involved—a roundelay of shifting attachments, flimsy alibis, and dangerously destablized identities that points, subtly but sharply, to a broader cultural tendency for role-playing in male-female relationships and behind closed doors. A near-climactic set piece at a soccer stadium nods (again, subtly) towards the Hitchcockian criss-cross of Strangers on a Train (1951), while a final (anti-) grace note evokes the cosmic, romantic fatalism  (if not quite the narrative elegance) of George Sluizer’s great Spoorloos (1988).

Adam Nayman