‘The Saviors’ Review: A Passable But Timely Genre Mystery Rooted In Islamophobic Fears

A timely dark comedy wrapped in Islamophobic paranoia, Kevin Hamedani’s “The Saviors” has genre twists and turns that ultimately lose steam, but they retain enough symbolic meaning to avoid falling apart. The movie follows a suburban California couple with a strained marriage, who lease their guest house to mysterious Middle Eastern neighbors, whose behavior they find perplexing. It plays with the cultural fears that have gripped America since September 11, and while it seldom explores these ideas in depth — or allows them to evolve beyond their on-screen introduction — Hamedani’s comedic stylings ensure the film retains some semblance of momentum, even when it runs in circles.

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Sean Harrison (Adam Scott) is plagued by repeated visions of domestic bliss with his wife Kim (Danielle Deadwyler) that soon turn deadly, as blinding lights stream in through his windows, and he steps outside to witness apocalyptic carnage. Upon waking, however, he finds a much more mundane reality. His marriage to Kim is on its last legs. He’s unemployed, and spends time either getting high in the basement of their quaint duplex, or visiting his more conservative sister Cleo (Kate Berlant) and their conspiracy-addled parents (Ron Perlman, Colleen Camp).

When the couple’s new tenants, siblings Amir (Theo Rossi) and Jahan (Nazanin Boniadi), arrive to occupy their backyard guesthouse, the brother-sister duo remain withdrawn, but seem to have the perfect answer for every question, and every apparent hole in their backstory. Something is clearly amiss (for instance, the hijabi Jahan speaks in sign language, and Amir claims she’s completely Deaf, but she seems to respond to sounds), which leads Sean down a conspiratorial rabbit-hole of his own, as he observes mysterious packages and devices laying around, and realizes the U.S. President is visiting their small town in a couple of days, amongst protests and counter-protests from various groups.

Kim, on the other hand, tries to calm Sean’s nerves, as the more level headed of the soon-to-be-former spouses, leading to some fun domestic comedy. But after a while, Amir and Jahan’s words and actions don’t add up even in her mind. On one hand, a film that plays with perspective in this way, to highlight the fearful mindset with which Muslims from Middle East are often viewed in the United States, is a potent premise, no-doubt informed by Hamedani’s own Iranian background. But on the other hand, Amir and Jahan do, in fact, act strangely enough — including walking around at night, and humming in cartoonishly sinister ways — that even the most rational and accepting observers would be rightly perturbed.

This often takes away from the point the film is trying to make, about the suspicions foisted upon innocent West Asians (Amir and Jahan’s background is left intentionally ambiguous). However, Scott and Deadwyler’s committed romantic performances — which end up situationally funny — and Hamedani’s aesthetic flourishes help introduce other thematic points that land in more specific and hard-hitting ways. The couple’s fizzling marriage, and their eventual drive to repair it at any cost, is invigorating in a way the film comes within inches of tethering to their inadvertent attempts to assert cultural dominance. Sean’s repeated, de-saturated visions, while seemingly tied to the strange activities the siblings hide behind closed doors, imbue the film with a sensation of truth, even though these images of destruction are tethered to one specific point of view. They become part of a vicious cycle, informing Sean’s suspicions, which appear to fuel these seeming hallucinations in return.

When racist paranoia is this potent, it can feel like a premonition, and even ostensible liberals like Sean and Kim aren’t off the hook, despite rejecting Sean’s far-right parents. That nothing is known or stated about this particular President is another intentional gap; while the Commander-in-chief’s party leanings have always had radical impact on domestic policy, the Middle East tends to be bombed regardless of who’s in charge (albeit to different degrees). There’s a constant feeling of chickens coming home to roost, regardless of what Amir and Jahan may or may not be up to.

In order to find out more about his guests, Sean eventually sets up a DIY surveillance state with the help of Cleo and her cartoonish P.I. contact Jim Clemente (played hilariously Greg Kinnear), leading to discoveries that open up new genre-centric possibilities. None of these questions are answered until the movie’s final moments, which ends up a tad frustrating, since they gesture towards a playful manipulation of POV that the Hamedani doesn’t end up capitalizing on. However, that he roots his characters’ delusions in their crumbling domestic lives, in ways they don’t quite realize, is perhaps the nugget of social commentary that works best, if only because it feels ever-present.

As much as “The Saviors” is about the violent ideas projected onto Muslims and “Arabs” (as Amir and Jahan are often called, even though they seem to be Persian), the film is equally if not more so about the sensations of discontent that eventually fan outward into both misguided hero complexes and violent persecution; the film premiering as U.S.-backed bombs fall on Iran is a premonition of its own. However, while the climactic revelations are surprising — there really is no way to see them coming — they aren’t necessarily thematically incisive. By the time they arrive, the film has long since said all that it’s going to say. The rest is just window dressing, but at least it’s somewhat entertaining.