Critics reviews

The starry cast (especially the stalwart Bardem) do their best to distract us from Farhadi’s thematic architecture, but it’s as conspicuous as the drones that hover about the proceedings, surveilling the ground-level activity like a filmmaker too removed from his subject.

The result retains the major flaws of all Farhadi’s films: histrionic acting, a proclivity for supposedly bravura camerawork that actually comes across as hackneyed, and, most calamitously (in all his films), overwrought narratives primed for dramatic tension which, for all the director’s concern for crafting intricate storylines, nonetheless contain gaping holes in the plot.

With a cast this starry and talented the play of revelation and counter-revelation that is reckoned to be Farhadi’s metier could hardly fail to entertain, even if the film rather shuns its environment and landscape in favour of somewhat stagey interiors. All the shades of agony from numbness to hysteria are portrayed – often with power, but at other times as if the performer could have used another take.

What remains, instead of clarified emotion is a series of emphatic, oddly ungrounded dramatic turns anchored by strenuously literal symbolism. . . . But by the halfway mark, it’s evident that Everybody Knows possesses neither the fulsome pleasures nor burnished insight of its melodramatic contours. All that remains is to count down the minutes.

Mr. Farhadi’s script is far too busy — the movie is crammed with characters and underexplored themes, including class tensions, nativism and ugly attitudes toward migrant workers — but he’s exceptionally deft at mining the spaces that open up between people, particularly during a crisis.

The cheeky not-quite-subversions of said mystery elements are too cute for their own good. Mystery, after all, operates on the limits of knowledge, and how can you have any mystery when…everybody knows?

Overwriting has been the constant weakness in Farhadi’s filmmaking, but here he outdoes himself. The narrative takes so many ridiculous turns in building up intrigue over who kidnapped Irene while simultaneously digging up buried resentments from the characters’ past, all for the sake of a narrative bombshell some two-thirds of the way in that most will have foreseen long before its embarrassingly earnest reveal.

Intricately layered with concerns of fidelity, debt, and class consciousness, Everybody Knows is as involving and suspenseful as any of the films that Iranian director Asghar Farhadi has made, if also quite a bit similar in terms of its themes and dramaturgy.

It’s hard not to notice that Farhadi has used a similar plotline about a missing person before, and to much more resonant effect, in “About Elly.” Here, transposing the action to a culture and a language that is not Farhadi’s native element has a curiously diminishing effect.