Two sisters, one absent brother, and a lie that will not stay small: Botox, the 2020 feature debut of Iranian director Kaveh Mazaheri, wraps a pitch-black comic sensibility around a slow-burning domestic thriller. Across 97 minutes it keeps shifting its footing between deadpan humour and genuine dread.
What is Botox about?
Akram and Azar live together in a household that has just lost its centre of gravity: their brother is gone, and rather than explain what happened, the sisters tell relatives and neighbours that he has fled to Germany in search of a better life. The cover story is meant to buy them a little peace. Instead it starts demanding maintenance — new details, new witnesses, new consequences — and each improvised answer binds the two women more tightly to the fiction they invented. As the months pass, the lie stops being something they tell and becomes something they live inside, steering both sisters toward stranger and darker territory than either of them intended.
About the cast
Susan Parvar and Mahdokht Molaei carry the film as the two sisters, playing off each other with an odd, absorbing rhythm — one guarded and practical, the other drifting somewhere harder to read. Soroush Saeidi rounds out the principal cast. Mazaheri directs his actors toward stillness rather than melodrama, which makes the occasional flashes of absurdity land all the harder.
Context & significance
Before Botox, Mazaheri was best known internationally for his award-winning short films, and his first feature keeps a short-filmmaker's discipline: few locations, a tight cast, and a premise followed to its logical end. The film travelled to international festivals in 2020 and drew attention for how comfortably it mixes registers — a comedy of social embarrassment on one level, a study of guilt and self-deception underneath. It sits within a strand of recent Iranian cinema more interested in moral ambiguity than tidy resolutions.
Watching Botox on K-Time
Botox is available to stream on K-Time — reading this page requires nothing, but watching the film needs a signed-in K-Time account. The service is designed for the Persian-speaking diaspora, with a fully Farsi interface, and Botox plays in its original Persian audio.