Snake milkers and the miserable lady

A snake catcher working for the Iranian antivenom department dies on the job. Once he miraculously returns to the living, the resurrected man refuses to go back to his old life. Shot against the backdrop of gorgeous Iranian scenery, filmmaker Vahid Alvandifar crafts a slyly satirical road movie out of this macabre fable.

A corpse in itself isn’t that scary, notes a passerby in this highly unusual road movie. A corpse that suddenly comes back to life, however, is a different matter altogether. That’s what happens in this slyly humorous first film directed on a shoestring budget by the ingenious, yet relatively underseen Iranian filmmaker Vahid Alvandifar. The man died on the job, working as a snake catcher in the state antivenom department. Two of his colleagues come to fetch his body from the morgue, but are soon faced with a new problem altogether: how to help a formerly deceased man who doesn’t want to go back to his old life? 

In the hands of Alvandifar, this macabre fable about dying becomes a poignant reflection on the conditions of life in contemporary Iran. Disguised as the titular miserable lady, the resurrected man and his colleagues try to sort his economic and legal affairs, while they contemplate what makes life worth living in the first place. Against the expressive backdrop of gorgeous Iranian scenery, Alvandifar has crafted a deceptively small film that casts a wide net on societal ills. 

– Hugo Emmerzael

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