World War III

Like Parasite it invokes endemic inequities through architectural verticality. Like the semi-basements and bunkers in Korea, the dispossessed are confined under the earth, the Netherworld of sorts in the Iranian film...

The questions it raises—as to what’s going on, who’s telling the truth, and the degree to which parallels between the movie in the film and Shakib’s dilemma are intentional—certainly account for a heightened level of ambiguity.

Bound to surprise audiences and bag awards, World War III is a film that makes you look forward to the next film that rhymes, if not repeats, its brilliance.

It shouldn't work, but it works like a Swiss timepiece, clicking along invisibly and betraying nothing while moving through a series of events that are at once entirely unpredictable and the only things that could possibly happen in hindsight.

Houman Seyedi’s startling, audacious and truly entrancing satire, World War III, deserved (Oscar) consideration...Seyedi and (his) co-screenwriters searingly comment on power, class and how everyone has a breaking point. And the ending is priceless.

Both sharply conceived and agonizingly performed, Seyyedi... presents a hot blast of social issue semantics defined by a direct conduit with a criminal underbelly often downplayed significantly in modern Iranian cinema.

World War III is, by turns, a character study, an examination of destructive class disjunction, a highly intense anecdote of scorching love, and a parody of commercial Iranian filmmaking.

With the urgency of a good thriller and the clarity of a fable, World War III is the gruelling but compelling tale of how one of life’s victims learns to imitate his oppressors.