UMBRA (TARIKI)

The scouts

Everyone's going to call this 'atmospheric,' but what's really subversive is how Jafarian weaponizes restraint—stripping away the soundtrack entirely, then building dread through pure framing geometry. It's the anti-thriller that makes you realize how much we've been trained to need the score.

This sits comfortably in a lineage of Iranian cinema that treats the city as psychological landscape, and the formal choice to alternate front-and-back framings recalls classical symmetry strategies while creating genuine spatial disorientation—a work aware of its own formal traditions and extending them with precision.

That decision to cut the ambient sound entirely and let the alternating perspectives do the work—it's the move that transforms what could be a familiar missing-person premise into something genuinely unsettling, proving you don't need budget, just one radical commitment to absence.

Reviews

Jafarian does an excellent job of paying attention to the small details of direction to quickly establish an uncomfortable atmosphere. There is absolutely no music in the film, and when a director chooses to ensure there is barely any exterior noises as well, that's when it's downright creepy.

Tariki (Umbra) tells the story of a young woman who emerges from her steamy bathroom to find her husband has disappeared, seeking her partner in the darkness of the streets of Tehran.

Festivals

• Cannes Film Festival 2018
• Toronto International Film Festival 2018
• Palm Springs International ShortFest 2019
• AFI Fest 2018