It’s hard to like Morteza. For starters, he may be cheating on his wife, Mojdeh (Hedieh Tehrani), who, from our knowledge, is devoted to her husband. The viewers’ dislike for him becomes exacerbated by his obsession with status and with him being wanting to be perceived as a true, card carrying patriarch. He complains to a co-worker that all Mojdeh brings him is shame, and he wonders when was the last time the neighbors smelled her cooking. And everyone knows that if the neighbors don’t smell your wife’s cooking anymore, they might think that more than just the oven isn’t working.

Onto another woman he projects his desire to escape from his ordinary domestic life. But desire creates desire, and Morteza (Hamid Farokh-Nejad), like a lot of us, forgets this. But in due time, he is back to where he started, scheming once again and wanting what he doesn’t have. As a result, Morteza becomes an object of pity, and thus empathy, under Asghar Farhadi’s skillful direction that refuses to depict any of his characters as one-dimensional.

It’s no coincidence that Rouhi (Taraneh Alidousti), a house cleaner who witnesses a lot of the drama in Morteza and Mojdeh’s household and who inadvertently becomes entangled in it, seems confused as to why this upper-middle-class couple who has so much is so sad. Farhadi (A Separation) is not one to avoid class conflicts and critiques, but this isn’t the simple trope of the rich leading sad, decadent lives while the less well-off lead gleeful, if happier lives. His story line concerns a more profound point about what motivates us and what prevents us from doing what we want.

The title refers to Persian New Year celebrations. Throughout, the noise of fireworks in the background is constant. There is no consistency or logic behind their interjections in the movie. We hear the noise faintly in the distance during various indoor scenes and vividly as Morteza plays with his son in the park, with the festivities booming around them. The fireworks are around for the beautiful moments and the muted ones, too. They’re chaos, they’re nothingness, they’re whatever we want them to be. They are one of the ways that Farhadi reminds us that life is endlessly complicated, that a single moment is infinitely divisible.

All of Farhadi films have a deep fascination with fate. He reminds us of the overwhelming, impenetrable magnitude of circumstance, of how, ultimately, there are countless external factors that determine and alter our lives that we have no control over. But his focus on the personal and the minute details of domestic life disguises the lofty theme of destiny, and it’s only in the latter parts of this film, and afterwards, that the big questions appear. Those familiar with Farhadi should know this trajectory well: an ordinary Iranian domestic setting (an urban family going about their day, a group of friends going on vacation to a beach house) is introduced, only to be steadily undermined by twists in a plot that force the ensemble to question everything (The Past, for example).

A lesser filmmaker and thinker would shy away from posing questions whose implications are unpleasant and anxiety inducing, but not here. After watching Fireworks Wednesday, you could walk away looking at the world from a harsh, deterministic perspective; we have no control over the direction of our lives and we should, accordingly, despair. Maybe that’s true. But maybe, like Morteza, we will continue to convince ourselves that happiness is just around the corner.