Not since “The Passion of the Christ” has a film depicted a public execution in such graphic detail. In the approximately 20 minutes during which the killing unfolds, the camera repeatedly returns to study the battered face and body of the title character (Mozhan Marno) as she is stoned to death. Buried up to her waist in a hole dug for the occasion, she is pelted with rocks and profanity by the male villagers, including her father, husband and two sons, until she dies. 

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Directed by Cyrus Nowrasteh, who wrote the screenplay with his wife, Betsy Giffen Nowrasteh, and filmed in an unidentified location to avoid possible reprisals, the movie re-enacts events that took place in Kupayeh, a small village in southwestern Iran, in August 1986. Mr. Sahebjam had surreptitiously returned to Iran from Paris to report on life under the Islamic government, then only seven years old.

Stranded in the village when his car breaks down, he is accosted by Soraya’s aunt Zahra (Shohreh Aghdashloo, familiar from “House of Sand and Fog”), who asks him to tape-record her account of her niece’s killing the day before. (In the book, two weeks have passed.) Ms. Aghdashloo, with her deep, husky voice, brings an anguished intensity to leaden, redundant dialogue that rings like strident editorial boilerplate. The screenplay’s oratorical tone is partly intentional, since the movie’s heavy-handed style harks back to the kind of 1950s Hollywood quasi-biblical parables starring Victor Mature and Jean Simmons that paraded themselves as sacred. 

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