“Watching Mohammad Rasoulof’s riveting "Manuscripts Don’t Burn," easily the most daring and politically provocative film yet to emerge from Iran, I was reminded of something I heard when visiting that country to study its cinema in the late ‘90s. When I asked an Iranian cinephile the difference between Iran’s artistically vital but little known cinema of the 1970s and its successor, which captured the world’s attention following the 1979 Iranian Revolution, he smiled and said, "In the post-revolutionary cinema, there is no bad guy." Films before the Revolution often conveyed a pervasive sense of bitterness and discontent, a mood ultimately traceable to one paramount bad guy: the Shah.
With "Manuscripts Don’t Burn," though, the bad guy returns to Iranian cinema with a vengeance. Based on real historical events, Rasoulof’s drama focuses on two operatives assigned to terrorize, torture and murder dissident writers and intellectuals. These guys go about their dirty business but they are simply repression’s foot soldiers. Far more chilling is their superior, a young guy who works in an office, wears fashionable clothes, and seems to have no qualms about advancing his career by killing former friends.”