Falling House review – fierce tale of an Iranian prison guard holding his family hostage

Venice film festival: Mohsen Gharaei’s powerfully acted domestic drama watches as the failing patriarch attempts to contain family rebellion Iran is a prison and everybody is inside: cons and non-cons; parents and their children.

That’s the message hammered home, never subtly but with terrific force and conviction, throughout the course of Mohsen Gharaei’s hothouse domestic drama, which plays in the Orizzonti section in Venice. It’s about a low-level jailer, crushed by life, who returns from the day job and proceeds to incarcerate his own…