The Past

The Past (Le passé, 2013) is Asghar Farhadi's quiet, devastating drama, and you can watch it online on iFILM. Ahmad flies in from Tehran to Paris to sign off on his divorce from Marie. He expects two days of paperwork.

What he walks into is a household full of tension. Marie (Bérénice Bejo) is frayed and short-tempered, her teenage daughter Lucie barely speaks to her, and a new man named Samir (Tahar Rahim) has already moved in with his young son. Ahmad, ever the peacemaker, starts trying to smooth things over between mother and daughter. Each conversation pulls a thread, and the thread leads somewhere nobody wanted reopened. The closer he gets, the clearer it becomes that Lucie's sullen anger is hiding someone else's guilt.

Farhadi works without a score, almost entirely through dialogue, turning a cramped suburban kitchen into a courtroom with no prosecutor. Bérénice Bejo took the Best Actress prize at Cannes for this, and the film sits comfortably beside A Separation in his run of moral puzzles. It rewards patience: the truth here arrives slowly, and it hurts. Stream The Past (2013) online on iFILM.