‘A Bit of Light’ Review: Ali Asgari’s Iranian Answer to ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ Is a Bit of a Miracle

Venice: On the eve of the current Iran war, a doctor prepares for suicide in a day-in-the-life drama that offers a mighty and coherent outlook on the big questions.

The painful phenomenon of suicide has preoccupied philosophers since the dawn of their discipline. Albert Camus gave it primacy over all other existential concerns. “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide,” he wrote in “The Myth of Sisyphus”. 

One of Ali Asgari‘s many achievements in “A Bit of Light” is how he avoids relitigating the obvious heavy personal, social, and theological arguments around this most sensitive of subjects. This is not a light movie, nor is it unconcerned with the value of a single human life. It’s simply unshackled by ass-covering sentimentality and takes as a given that a sane person living in contemporary Iran might choose to die by their own hand on their own terms. 

Asgari trusts this premise’s power and mounts a finely focused, mature, and moving drama with a quietly perfect ending that repays the title and then some.

We are dropped into the middle of a difficult conversation taking place in a sparsely decorated bachelor pad in Tehran. Arash (Misagh Zareh) hits a button on a coffee machine, staring at the brown liquid shooting down. He returns to the table where his shaken younger brother is clearly grappling with a revelation. Maziyar (Ramtin Daghigh) keeps it together as Arash talks about handing over keys and paperwork, but then mounts a desperate argument. “Let me hook you up with some chicks. They’ll be around you and keep you busy. Then we’ll see if you still think about suicide or not.”

Arash has alerted Maziyar that he will be taking his own life “very soon.” He is only willing to discuss what this means in practical terms — who will adopt his cat, who will take his plants — while weathering emotional reactions with the stoicism of the doctor that he is. He frames his confession as an ethical duty. It would be wrong for the news of his suicide to come as a shock. Hence, the order of the day is to notify all three siblings — Maziyar, Mahsa (Sadaf Asgari), and Massi (Forouzan Jamshidnejad) — before the quartet come together to tell the final boss: Mother (Mina Rahimzadeh). 

It joins the mini canon of day-in-the-life movies that could well be the character’s final day. (See also: “Oslo, August 31st” and “It’s a Wonderful Life.”) Every encounter, every drop of kindness contrasted against the infinite void, takes on an outsize beauty and nobility.

Misagh Zareh, who played the oppressive patriarch in “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” draws from a different well to give a subtly anguished performance so attuned to the material that he seems to have grown out of it. Arash is not fully disconnected. He has the power of rational speech and the capacity for boundaried connections with people. Still, he carries within him the mystery of the death drive, Thanatos. The particulars of how it has taken hold are not something he cares to explain.

A lithe and loaded script co-written by Asgari and Shadmehr Rastin (Jafar Panahi’s regular screenwriter) feeds in social context without suggesting direct causality between one thing and another. Before Arash can continue his grim tour of duty, he is intercepted by a tearful young woman seeking a prescription for her ailing father. After some back-and-forth, it emerges that Arash is her father’s doctor. He insists that he cannot help. The young woman will not give up. Arash eventually relents. We learn that he was recently arrested for giving medical treatment to young injured protestors. The regime has now sealed up his office as a crime scene.

Shot during the war but set just before the war, there is an anxiety gnawing at almost everyone. People are taping up windows as protection from U.S. bombs, and a hollow Trump joke is made. Arash, his fate decided, remains apart from these conversations, focusing on the here and now. He may be too weary to think about the future; still, he can’t numb himself entirely to the lifeforce of others. A subplot grows out of the concern he can’t quite shed for the injured protestors convalescing at home, unable to go to a hospital out of fear of still worse retribution. If he dies, what will become of them? 

Asgari holds in balance the most powerful argument against taking your life, which is to say that we have no idea how much we mean to other people, with a respect for Arash’s autonomy and his capacity as a rational being to decide that he has no future here.

The four members of his close family give shape to the film, each afforded a chance to say what they need, interactions infused by the pre-existing conditions of their relationship. Youngest sister Mahsa is a yoga teacher, while older sister Massi is semi-estranged from him. He sternly warns against the delivery of lectures before he breaks the news. An exalted combination of careful characterization and layered performance leads to one gently gripping scene after another. There are even organic outgrowths of humor born from the esoteric bonds of families. Not to mention the fact that the plants he’s trying to rehome are not particularly appealing to anyone.

A visually unshowy motion picture, it relies on dialogue to do the heavy lifting. There are no false notes here. Given the weighty material and heightened circumstances, it is a minor miracle that we remain rooted in naturalistic performances. Zareh’s lead turn is matched by Daghigh, Sadaf Asgari, and Jamshidnejad. Their different flavors of internalized conflict upon hearing the news lead to nuanced emotional weather. There is so much to say and so little time to say it. Now is not the time to sweat the small stuff. But how can they find the right words? And also, some of Arash’s plants are eyesores.  

Asgari holds his tonal nerve while plotting a path across an emotional ravine, never letting any performance become macabre, hysterical, cold, or reductive. In other words: there is a gentle and elusive lifeforce permeating this uncompromising depiction of a man who wants to die. Asgari chooses details over melodrama at every moment, framing small things to an enlivening effect so that they land like a hug on a body that hasn’t been held in years. In the end, Maziyar, Mahsa and Massi uphold the caring wisdom of the script. Words are of less importance than being with him now.

Their compassion doesn’t pit him against them, like a group counsel mounting a case for him to stay. It simply exists, and he even feels it sometimes. This may look like a humble film, yet it has a mighty scope thanks to an auteurial perspective in harmony with all of its characters. 

In her recent lecture on Cinematic Wonder and the Recovery of the World, Kings College London professor Dr. Catherine Wheatley focused on the ways that being present in nature can release us from despair. Referring to the nature writer, she said, “[Rachel] Carson argues that wonder is the way back to the world that we have lost…She bemoans the tendency of adults to seek out rare experiences rather than paying attention to the ordinary world that surrounds them, ‘the world of little things’ that is available to us daily and nightly.”

Principally shot on location in Tehran (until the war forced the film team to relocate to Turkey to shoot the final interior scenes), it turns out that the world of little things exists here, too. This becomes strikingly apparent once the four siblings reach Mother’s house. Arash’s steely sense of duty falters for the first time in the face of her maternal love. The foursome prepare dinner together in a grave silence punctuated by instinctive food-prep advice. The innocence and dramatic irony of ma being ma proves increasingly magnetic. This is a restrained Iranian answer to Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life,” no less affecting because its climax holds more ambiguity than absolution.

Grade: A-

“A Bit of Light” premiered at the 2026 Venice Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.