‘Woman and Child’ Review: Parinaz Izadyar’s Powerhouse Performance in Iranian Melodrama Is a Contender for the Cannes Best Actress Prize

Cannes: The knife keeps twisting in this tale of a mother and nurse pushed to the edge.

Most of us don’t appreciate where our problems sit on a scale from ordinary to tragic. One day your frustrations relate to impressing the family of your intended husband, or to the local school’s struggles to contain your tearaway son. The next day, there are no footholds for this conventional social anxiety because the bottom has fallen out of your world. 

Selling a descent from stress into a state of devastation that can never be shed (only briefly reprised) is the formidable actress Parinaz Izadyar. Remarkably, considering how often she is tasked to cry or yell, there is nothing repetitive to her performance. She keeps reacting to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune with fresh volatility, not letting her character, Mahnaz, become passive or automated.

Returning to the Cannes competition lineup after 2022’s “Leila’s Brothers” Iranian melodramatist, Saeed Roustayi, proves that he has an Almodovarian flair for painting in the colors of female pain under patriarchy. While his production design is more naturalistic than the Spaniard’s, the voluptuous emotional expression is comparable and Roustayi knows just when to rein it in for a moment of beautifully composed quiet.

Quiet can never be achieved when pre-adolescent nightmare Aliyar is around. Mahnaz’s son is a Tasmanian devil spinning his ticking time bomb energy into entrepreneurial pursuits (running a gambling ring at school), bullying classmates and yelling at any adult that interferes with his forcefield. When Aliyar breaks a match inside a lock and traps 700 kids in the school playground, he is suspended for a week from school. (This does, in fact, feel fair.)

It does, however, create an extra problem for Mahnaz — a hospital nurse — raising two kids (the second child is a meek girl) in her mother’s house after the death of her first husband. A romantic rapport with paramedic Hamid (Payman Maadi) has reached the point where he wants to propose, necessitating the blessing of his family from out of town. In order for this to happen, evidence of her two children must be scrubbed from the premises. The news of their existence will be broken at a less pivotal moment.  

The first act unrolls the settings and characters that dominate Mahnaz’s life and work. Roustayi makes it clear that we’re embedding in a flawed microcosm where no one is on their best behavior. Hamid is always hustling the infirm to supplement his earnings. Mahnaz is an apologist for Aliyar’s antisocial behaviors, dismissing a colleague’s valid objections that the kid makes her uncomfortable. As Aliyar demands an explanation for this 30-year-old woman’s lack of response to his Instagram messages, she can laugh at his childlike precocity while fearing the not too distant day when these overtures will feel more menacing. He is at an age where the shadow of the man he will become looms large.

With the exception of Mahnaz’s straight-shooting mother, the women in her life fade into the background within this early hustle. Younger sister Mehri (Soha Niasti) and daughter Neda are barely registered as our leading lady focuses on wrangling men to transform her modern family situation and set down new socially acceptable roots.

Then comes a double whammy of tragedy and betrayal that makes Mahnaz’s efforts to fit into normal Iranian society a wild dream of yesteryear. Roustayi excels at threading transformative moments through scenes mounted upon other business. In the corner of a busy room someone is looking someone else in the eye and now nothing will be the same again. The biggest moments happen off screen. We are shown the build-up and the aftermath as Mahnaz rushes to catch up with what her life has become and to count who is still there.

Inasmuch as emotional arcs are pitched toward the extreme, domestic and work settings are sketched with a keen anecdotal eye and enlivened with compelling details. Pity the poor female patient trying to find the voice to object as Mahnaz conducts a passionate phone call at the same time as she injects the patient’s hand with a needle. On the home front, Fereshteh Sadre Orafaee almost walks away with the whole film in the course of another phone call. Her social politesse transforms into a maternal fury and the air turns blue with inventive insults.

A few structural issues threaten to tip the balance from cinematic melodrama into TV soap as the bad news keeps on coming, but Izadyar’s sustained emotional conviction carries the vision onwards. Working with cinematographer Adib Sobhani, Roustayi finds moments at home and at work to let the visual elements take over from the fizzing human drama. Two hospital scenes featuring a ventilator bookend key events, serving as boundaries between the person Mahnaz used to be and how far she is willing to go now.

Home – not the one she thought she was building, but still nonetheless a home, emerges as the focus of the second half of the film. Three women therein alternately tolerate and turn on each other. Their unspoken bond is the knowledge that they are beholden to different rules than the men in their lives. The patriarchy expresses itself in standards of behavior the men around them feel they can get away with. ‘Woman and Child’ is scarcely a film about personal triumph, but as the chance of conventional assimilation into Iranian society is wrenched from Mahnaz, who then takes it upon herself to blast it further out of reach, Roustayi’s intelligent film poses the question over whether the raw remains have their own value.

Grade: B+

“Woman and Child” premiered in Competition at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.

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