‘The Friend’s House Is Here’ Review: The Regime Threatens Two Underground Artists’ Friendship in a Fizzy, Defiant Iranian Drama

The Iranian government has long maintained a rather trigger-happy approach to censorship, to put it mildly. It stands to reason that the Islamic Republic would only tighten its grip in response to the largest civilian uprising since the 1979 revolution — a regime-threatening movement that has resulted in the murders of at least 6,000 civilians since the end of December, with some estimates maintaining that security forces have killed more than 30,000 people. 

And yet even in the full context of recent events, as well as the increasingly frequent jailings of filmmakers like Jafar Panahi, Saeed Roustayi, and Mohammad Rasoulof over the last 16 years, it can be hard to wrap your head around the fact Maryam Ataei and Hossein Keshavarz’s “The Friends House is Here” had to be shot in secret and then smuggled out of the country by a crew member in order to make it to Utah for its world premiere. (The finished DCP was pasted onto the end of a religious film in the hopes of keeping it hidden from state officials.) 

While this spry — and, in some ways, very Sundance-coded — drama is an unambiguous show of defiance against the Iranian regime, it’s also largely free of the heaviness people tend to associate with dissident cinema. The circumstances of the movie’s creation might steel you for something in the vein of “It Was Just an Accident” (even if its title responds to Abbas Kiarostami’s much gentler “Where Is the Friend’s House?”). The fraught but fizzy hangout movie you’ll get instead feels more like “Frances Ha.” 

Of course, that such a relatively buoyant movie about creativity and dinner parties could still be regarded as a threat to the regime is an embarrassment to autocracies everywhere, but “The Friend’s House Is Here” isn’t meant as a stick in the eye of the Iranian government so much as a bittersweet celebration of the underground artists who refuse to be silenced by it. Far too modest and deeply felt to come off as self-congratulatory, Ataei and Keshavarz’s film tells the story of two women — an avant-garde theater director and an improvisational dancer — whose friendship is as unbothered by the government as their work is defined by it. 

Hanna (Hana Mana) maintains a popular Instagram account and posts videos in which she illegally dances in front of historical Iranian landmarks. The comparatively uptight Pari (Mahshad Bahraminejad) mounts nonlinear plays that depict the intrusion of political anxiety on everyday Iranian spaces. “The Friend’s House Is Here” often embodies that intrusion with its own visual grammar, not only by staging Pari’s work in a way that blurs the lines between fiction and reality, but also in framing the more casual scenes in a series of tableaux-esque long takes. 

At times, these sustained wide shots accentuate the openness of Hanna’s living room (where the women host lively post-show dinner parties full of innocent gossip and whispered concern about security crackdowns). At other times, they call attention to the partitioned design of her kitchen/dining room, ostensibly separate areas whose closeness reflects the tense yet inextricable relationship between the personal and the political in a country whose government refuses to make any distinction between the two. In the living room, a mustached video artist named Ali (a winsome Farzad Karen as Hanna’s new boyfriend) laments that “Every day, everything is up in the air.” In the kitchen, that same nervous sentiment hangs in the air without having to be spoken.

For the most part, however, Pari and Hanna give each other the freedom to live outside of such concerns. Their friendship is a jump-cut forward in a place that’s being dragged backwards in time, and while Ataei and Keshavarz’s film doesn’t aspire to quite the same logorrheic energy of a Baumbach and/or Gerwig joint, there’s a palpable vitality in watching these women bicker at home, shop at the mall, and generally move through Tehran with the blithest of spirits. When a stranger chastises them for not wearing hijabs in public, Pari and Hanna can barely manage to stifle a laugh. “This country is so full of artists,” Hanna says when they come across a rock band playing to an eager crowd in an alley. “Let’s see if they let it stay like this.” 

Spoiler alert: They won’t. They already didn’t. But freedom of expression is a constant pursuit, as natural as breathing, and silencing it is an imperfect practice that exhausts the oppressor and energizes the oppressed. So while it’s only a matter of time before “The Friend’s House Is Here” confronts Pari and Hanna with the threat of separation (or worse), the movie has a natural resistance toward the clearly defined structure that tends to force itself on stories like this one. Yes, a happy first act gives way to a tenser second and a somewhat resilient third, but too-rigid divisions would be antithetical to a film so devoted to the overlap between freedom and tyranny, and the most striking moments that Ataei and Keshavarz create here are the ones in which their characters are forced to negotiate between self-expression and self-preservation rather than choose between them. 

Hanna has decided to leave Iran for an indeterminate period of time, and though Pari can’t bear the thought of being away from her best friend, she respects the decision — and processes her fears by staging (and acting in) a play in which a girl named “Hanna” suddenly goes missing. When the ensemble cast gathers to console her character, it feels as if the weight of Pari’s grief is perfectly counterbalanced by the support of her community. Alas, the artistic conduit that Pari creates for her fears is a two-way street, and the film’s most unnerving scene, shot in a menacing slow zoom, observes in horror as a friendly post-show conversation sours into the stuff of a direct threat. 

At its most potent when it simply watches Pari and Hanna be or perform, “The Friend’s House Is Here” loses some of its soft power during a long — if beautifully shot — climactic detour in which the women pay a visit to Pari’s mom, which feels like it belongs to a different and more plot-driven movie than the one leading up to that point. A nebulous story about resolve in the face of abstract threats suddenly hardens into a concrete dilemma about securing the money for a plane ticket. But even that digression is tender, lived-in, and relevant to the relationship between self-preservation and community under authoritarian rule, which this soft but subversive film convincingly brings together as one and the same, as indivisible from each other as people are from their own creative expression. “In art,” Pari tells someone, “you don’t ask for permission.” “The Friend’s House Is Here” offers a gently stirring reminder that no one can take it away from you.

Grade: B+

“The Friend’s House Is Here” premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.

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