Mortician 2025 film still

'Mortician' (2025) Edinburgh Fim Review: A Ticking Bomb of Moral Duty

Vassilis Kroustallis reports on the 'Mortician' film that won at the Edinburgh International Film Festival 2025.

Abdolreza Kahani (Twenty, Over There, A Shrine) crafts a ticking bomb of state oppression, imposed on its subject, in his morally porous yet cinematically transparent exploration of duty and human connection in the Edinburgh world-premiered (and awarded) 'Mortician'.

Mojtaba (Nima Sadr) is a middle-aged Iranian in Canada, seemingly lost in the everyday duties of a mortician who washes the bodies of the recently deceased Iranians in Canada. Being engaged to his government-instructed duties (he gets 2,500 CAD per month) With due devotion, even though the work is floundering, he fails to do something for himself -in the film's early scenes, we see him cleaning his teeth and going to the shower at the same time, as if personal hygiene can be accomplished all at once. 

Yet his colleagues ask him to look beyond work and family - he constantly puts a large amount of his monthly salary to support his family, including his living parents and eight unemployed siblings. A few incidents of 'clients' who clearly cannot understand the religious underpinnings of the job description, and, after an inevitable sacking off, the mortician now meets (in a clandestine way) the singer Jana (Gola), a dissident singer. Jana, a religious person in her own way but without the self-sacrifice Mojtaba puts in his work, is ready to commit the ultimate sacrifice and commit suicide as a protest for her fellow citizens' oppression and fate. The mortician will be handsomely paid to do his duty.

The above is the intriguing premise in Kahani's snow-filled tale of moral duty that only gets heavier narratively (and yet more intriguing) as the film progresses. Like Ján Kadár & Elmar Klos's irresistible 'The Shop on Main Street' (but with gender-reversed characters and a total absence of malice from both sides), 'The Mortician' becomes an anatomy of a relationship whose progress reveals more layers hidden underneath. Jana and Mojtaba inevitably become closer, and we learn more about the mortician's duty burden (in a state that seems to impose such burdens on its citizens, but neglects its own duties - the mortician still complains about the small pension of disability his father receives). Kahani is not much interested in developing a common ground for these two outcasts, but instead prefers to expose their situation out in the open. Jana needs to get her videos in her underwear to get more viewers - a consumerist trend to which Mojtaba unhappily (and shyly) obliges. Mojtaba can break when he has to bring to mind his wasted life -is that the reason he abandons the religious rituals that were so useful to his job description? Being a servant seems to suit him better than being a person with one's own dreams -no wonder he admires the single dream Jana has, to die as a mark of public protest.

Even though 'Mortician' features the two outcasts, it is never a two-hander. The Canadian icy, almost clinical wilderness (very few animals are around) is nature's way of making punishment worse in the Eden that the two characters chose to inhabit, even with its own basement and amenities. Various characters will come and go in Mojtaba's life and occurrences, adding a little bit of external pressure (or conspiracy theories) that increasingly haunt this tightly-knit film.

In the almost absence of a musical soundtrack, 'Mortician' feels like an everyday task that needs to be accomplished, in the same way that Mojtaba's life looks like from the outside. The fact that complex situations arise from seemingly actual and heartfelt human interactions is to the benefit of a film that piercingly pushes the envelope between doing your duty and dying for your duty - two sides of the same cinematic coin.

The abrupt but still well-planned ending intensifies this essay-style of a film, whose director's 'solo cinema' imposes. 'Mortician' never lets you go of what the human predicament is in oppressive circumstances, and Nima Sadr makes it obvious with his well-calculated ritual performance that there are fewer options left. It is a work of sad reflection but also vivid alert, and cannot be missed.

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