Everybody Knows

Aesthetically flawless and brilliantly acted, but too melodramatic and generic for me

I think there are several layers. There is the first layer of the film that is a thriller - though not necessarily in the meaning of a detective story or a film trying to surprise and confuse the viewer - but this aspect is just a pretext to plunge into the path of my characters. That's where the interest lies, in the path and the secret and the mystery of the characters. So there is this first layer, this general aspect, but if someone is really searching for a thriller, they would not find it her__e. And it was not my intention to make a thriller for the sake of making one.

• Asghar Farhadi; "Director Asghar Farhadi Interview: Everybody Knows" (Justin Quinzon); ScreenRant (February 15, 2019)

Rarely has a filmmaker been so intimately tied to a place as two-time Academy Award-winning writer/director Asghar Farhadi is to his native Iran. Since his 2003 directorial debut, Raghs dar ghobar [Dancing in the Dust], six of his eight films have been set there, collectively mapping out the socio-political soul of the country, examining such socially-realist topics as divorce (Raghs dar ghobar, Jodaeiye Nader az Simin [A Separation]), crime (Shah-re ziba [Beautiful City], Forushande [The Salesman]), secrets and lies (Chaharshanbe-soori [Fireworks Wednesday], Darbareye Elly [About Elly]), and the themes for which he's best known; class and the importance of the past in the present. In 2013, he made his first film outside Iran, Le Passé [The Past], which was set in France, although it did feature an Iranian protagonist, and was thematically uniform with his previous work. His second such film, Todos lo saben [lit. trans. Everybody Knows It], is set in Spain, and although it finds him working for the first time with a relatively conventional genre template, it remains thematically very much a Farhadi film.

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