After Abbas Kiarostami’s masterpiece Taste of Cherry (1997), making a film about a man who announces his intention to commit suicide and who, in the meantime, eventually finds the meaning of life is a serious challenge, but Kiarostami’s compatriot Ali Asgari tries his luck with A Bit of Light, which is one of the last contenders presented in the Venice Film Festival’s competition this year. Unsurprisingly, the result does not surpass its predecessor, while it is also something of a domestic variation on the theme, in which the philosophical question of “to be or not to be” is reduced to a more immediate hesitation over the sense of living a life of continuous affliction. And instead of an uplifting existential reflection, we get a whining tirade about everyday hardships set against the background of the current political turmoil, in a movie that uses the aesthetics of a Turkish soap opera.

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Middle-aged man Arash (Misagh Zareh) is a doctor who has just been banned from medical practice by the repressive Iranian state for treating protesters against the government. He is feeling useless and stuck in a dead-end situation, and the film begins by catching Arash at a moment when he has already decided to end his life and is now dealing with the practicalities while preparing all of his close ones for the fateful event – a distressed friend, his two overly worried sisters and, in the end, his mother, whom he will eventually also have to tell. While clearing out his house and looking for new owners for his cat and plants, Arash wanders around the city, coming across stories more tragic than his own. On the one hand, these encounters seem to reinforce his despair at the world he has been condemned to live in, but on the other, they make him feel surrounded by warmth and that he is still needed – whether to ease the pain of his dying patient or to bring joy to his elderly mother. The threat he makes at the beginning of the film ultimately becomes a rhetorical question.

The problem here is not the predictability of the plot, which is so obvious that it allows a guilt-free spoiler drop, but rather the film’s unspoken insistence that it is grappling with the essence of existence, when in fact it barely scratches the surface – “Joy and suffering are not enemies,” uttered by one of the sisters, is perhaps the most insightful spiritual revelation. In his manic obsession with arranging his own death, the difficult-to-sympathise-with, narcissistic central character torments those close to him with details that may never even become relevant, and even the dark humour is insufficient to cover up such a self-centred premise. Asgari’s broader goal, of course, is to criticise the Iranian regime in an absurdist manner within the context of the military attacks taking place amidst Trump’s insanity, but these kinds of observations also fail to go deeper than a topical commentary on positions that have already been voiced time and time again. Тhe film’s greatest shortcoming, however, inevitably measured against Kiarostami, is its domestic, uncinematic style, compounded by poor dialogue. Such a lack of imagination cannot be blamed solely on the restrictions during filming, which merely explain the abundance of interior and in-car shots. With so little visual storytelling, the experienced Misagh Zareh is left to carry the entire emotional weight of his character through moist-eyed looks and staring, in the end successfully leading the viewer to the predictable finale by way of the movie's greatest virtue: its short running time.

A Bit of Light was produced by Iran’s Seven Springs Pictures and Switzerland’s Sunny Independent Pictures, in co-production with Iran’s Haurvatat Film, Italy’s Zoe Films and Memo Films, France’s Salt for Sugar Films, and Canada’s Good Measure Productions. Salaud Morisset handles its international sales.