With Hollywood typically being an unstoppable machine that pushes thousands of movies out of its production line every year, sometimes it’s easy to forget that making movies can be an act of defiance. For instance, in the case of the Iranian film industry, being a filmmaker means submitting to censorship or facing persecution by the government, possibly even risking your freedom. With that in mind, it’s a wonder that Iranian director Karim Lakzaheh managed to shoot Dark Matter, a provocative film about the potency of filmmaking. However, as essential as it might be as a political tool, its experimental approach to storytelling challenges the audience’s ability to connect with it.

Dark Matter follows Mahdis Mahdiyar and Keivan Parmar as two aspiring actors who risk their day jobs hoping to get roles in an Iranian movie. They don’t land the parts, but instead of returning to their mundane lives, the friends decide to take matters into their own hands and make a movie themselves, with the help of wannabe director Ziya (Iman Sayyadborhani). While the trio has the ambition to spare, making a movie without money is impossible, so they plan a burglary to help get the project off the ground.

There’s something inventive in a story about filmmakers who turn to crime to keep making art. Nevertheless, Dark Matter is not particularly interested in the heist. Instead, the film presents a chaotic journey where fact and fiction intertwine, shattering the barriers between art and life. It’s a powerful message made more relevant by the barebones directing approach. That’s because, just like the character of his movie, Lakzadeh is also using a camera to capture a bland reality and turn it into something magical. Some of the greatest filmmakers of all time, such as Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, preached about the need to approach cinema as a wild beast that should run free instead of trapping it by overproduction. However, by mimicking the French New Wave style, Dark Matter also ends up reproducing the lack of coherence of the movement.

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In Dark Matter, the filmmaking trio constantly discusses what kind of movie they should make, using the bizarre experiences brought by fate as the raw material for their artistic creation. While metalinguistic awareness can be compelling, its explosive creativity often gets dispersed by self-referential commentary. That’s because the film goes as far as having its characters direct their gaze to the public and explain some of Lakzadeh’s choices, breaking the fourth wall. The idea is to remove any distinction between reality, the movie, and the movie within a movie. Even if that looks good on paper, the repetition of this resource sinks the immersion and leads to uneven pacing.

There’s also something to be said about the movie’s performances. Dark Matter is a challenging project for actors, who must perform while simultaneously showing their awareness of the fictional structure of the film. Still, rather frequently, the acting can become too exaggerated to be taken seriously, weakening the movie’s emotional stakes. And while the central theme of Dark Matter is that there’s no difference between reality and filmmaking, without a clear emotional hook, it’s hard to care about the fate of its characters.

‘Dark Matter’ Works Better as a Political Manifesto
Image via Karlovy Vary International Film Festival

Even if Dark Matter is not a particularly engaging movie to watch, the constant challenge of Iranian censorship turns it into a courageous political manifesto. In 1979, the Islamic Revolution replaced the Imperial State of Iran with the Islamic Republic of Iran. In the years that followed, Iran’s legal system was overhauled to follow Islam’s religious doctrine, with women losing their rights as equal citizens and any questioning of the government class ruled as heresy and punished accordingly. When it comes to cinema, Iranian movies need an official green light before being distributed to the public, with censorship agents making sure that any artistic production follows Iran’s strict laws and doesn’t deal with themes that could challenge the moral order of the country.

Dark Matter was shot in Iran under the censorship radar, only to be featured in the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival without an agreement from the government. The most obvious aspect of the movie’s political ethos is Lakzadeh’s refusal to adhere to the hijab law, under which all female characters in an audiovisual production must have their hair covered at all times. Besides not respecting this restrictive Iranian regulation, Dark Matter even uses the story to discuss how cinema made under censorship cannot be an honest work of art.

This rebellious spirit extends beyond the depiction of free female characters. The whole movie is about marginal people following their dreams and being sabotaged by a society that doesn’t support its youth. It’s an unflinching look at Iran that contradicts the official discourse of peace and prosperity, which is in turn reflected in the Iranian movies produced under censorship. In the decades since the Iranian Revolution, there has been an effort to neuter any story that’s based on contradiction and free thinking. It’s no wonder some of the most intriguing movies by Iranian filmmakers, such as Under the Shadow and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, were shot abroad.

Dark Matter is an extremely important piece of cinema due to what it means in the context of Iranian repression. Yes, it can be rough around the edges and doesn’t do much with its fascinating concept. Still, the fact Lakzadeh filmed his insurgent film in and around Tehran, the capital of Iran, turns it into an important record of the emergent wave of social unrest in Iran that denounces police brutality and demands equal rights for women.

Rating: B-

Dark Matter had its world premiere at 2023’s Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.