Imagine a TV reality show that goes something like this: a female murderer enters a studio to face a victim’s angry and bitter family. Viewers vote via text on whether the family should spare the murderer from a death sentence. And if the killer is pardoned, the show’s sponsors and viewers pony up blood money to compensate for the family’s loss. Is this unusual spectacle Real Housewives Meets the Hunger Games? 

No. The show was an actual program called Honey Moon that ran in Iran for 11 years. It took an eye-for-eye Islamic principle—a wronged family decides the fate of the wrongdoer—and turned the dilemma into a public spectacle. Based on this high-stakes entertainment, a typically burnished, cheesy TV studio set and busy control room serve as the backdrop for Massoud Bakhshi’s intriguing drama, winner of a 2020 World Cinema Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. While the film could use a little more shading and heft, it benefits by casting a very particular eye onto a society we don’t often see on screen, with customs we may not understand but emotions and complications we recognize.

It is the night of Yalda, an Iranian winter solstice holiday devoted to forgiveness, but young Maryam (Sadaf Asgari) is nervous. She’s accused of actions leading to the death of her much older husband, and she’s gearing up to confront the dead man’s daughter, Mona (Behnaz Jafari), for a reckoning on national television. Bullying producers and her meddling mother do little to calm Maryam’s agitation. Not long after the director calls “Action!” the show’s zealous moderator and Maryam’s cool accuser back the unsophisticated young woman into a corner.

Sad details of emerge from the May-December marriage, an Islamic temporary arrangement Maryam desperately wanted to become permanent. Versions of the longstanding relationship between the two families conflict, but both women reveal a history of coercion, dependency, and transactional favors. Maryam seems on the verge of a breakdown that may jeopardize her exoneration before an outsider arrives to reveal a crucial secret.

In some ways, Yalda, Night for Forgiveness resembles Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi’s celebrated A Separation in its focus on class tension and fates determined by uncontrollable forces. However, it lacks that film’s complex characterizations and formal finesse. A few of the movie’s late-breaking events read like awkward melodrama. In the standoff between the two women, Maryam is too much a helpless, weeping victim and her adversary too implacable and haughty. But perhaps Bakhshi is implying that the television studio, with its pumped-up suspense and confessional mode, forces women to present caricatures of their real selves for a mass audience.

One of the film’s more interesting visual features includes shots of producers, guests, and hangers-on acting out silently through glass and at odd angles, as if to remind us that reality is subjective and no one really knows the truth, but life goes on. Yalda may not take its unconventional premise as far as it might, but the ride is an unsettling one nevertheless.