Released under the original title 2020 and catalogued here simply as V, Philippe Asmar's Lebanese action thriller pits a decorated police officer against a serial killer who wants to be chased, and stretches that duel across a generous one-hundred-and-forty-minute running time.
What is V about?
The officer at the centre of V has a reputation. He is the kind of cop whose name gets mentioned when a case looks unsolvable, and that reputation is precisely what draws the attention of a serial killer operating in the city. Instead of hiding, the murderer sends out an open challenge: catch me if you can. What follows is a contest of nerves in which each side tries to anticipate the other, with the officer working through leads while the person he is hunting keeps rewriting the rules. The film is not content to stay in one register. Heavy-duty action sequences sit alongside a romance that the script treats with a light, teasing touch, and a strain of dark humour runs through even the grimmer stretches.
About the cast
Kosai Khauli, Nadine Njeim, Hussein Mokadem, Carmen Lebbos and Ramy Ayash make up the credited cast. The film gives its principals room to play both sides of its tone, so the same performers handle the tense confrontations and the lighter romantic and comic beats rather than splitting those jobs between separate ensembles.
Context & significance
V is a Lebanese production from 2021 and belongs to the action-thriller strand of Arabic-language commercial cinema rather than to the festival-oriented art-house side. Philippe Asmar directs. The original title, 2020, is the one the film carried on release; the single-letter title V is how it appears in the K-Time catalogue. At one hundred and forty minutes, it is long for an action thriller, and that length is spent on building the rivalry rather than rushing it, giving the cop-versus-killer premise time to develop the romantic and comic threads that distinguish it from a standard procedural. Audience reception was warm.
Watching V on Ktime
K-Time streams V with a Persian dub and Persian subtitles, so the film can be watched either in Farsi or in its original audio with subtitles. You need to be signed in to a K-Time account to play it; creating one is free, and the entire experience, from browsing to playback, is presented in Farsi for Persian-speaking viewers abroad.