Shakespeare wrote this story more than 400 years ago and, not surprisingly, made a much better job of it. This Belgian-made film by a Kurdish director is competently made with decent acting throughout. All technical aspects are good, and it is quite watchable, but let down by the story and especially the characters. While Othello is a strong and positive figure, deluded by the much cleverer Iago, Zagros, on screen most of the time, is foolish, weak-minded and pathetic. He presents an appearance of wanting to sympathise with his slandered wife, yet is prepared at every turn to doubt her and believe the slander, which contains nothing clever at all. Sometimes this is taken to silly extremes, as when he cruelly mistreats his frightened daughter in a swimming pool or walks the streets of Brussels, showing photos to strangers with no common language and asking whether the daughter looks more like him or a man he suspects.
I should be rooting for the wife here, but she too is foolish and indecisive, contributes to her own problems and arouses little sympathy. 'You are a good man,' she tells Zagros early on, presumably because he usually stops short of physically attacking her. When others do, she apparently becomes too 'weak' to defend herself. She fails, for an age, to eject her hostile and vile father in law from the Brussels apartment she allows her husband to share, and does so only when subjected to extreme and deliberate provocation. It's almost certain that her only smart move, her flight from a village where she seems to be almost universally despised, was forced on her by her concerned, stronger and more independent sister Eliz. As for the husband's appalling family, they seem to hate for its own sake and in the most unreasoned ways - there is no depth of character to see in any of them, nor anything of interest.
There was only one review when I wrote this. That reviewer seems attracted by a 'romantic' society where everything 'has its simple place'. He may be unaware that attitudes like this prevail throughout the rural Muslim world and far beyond, with women routinely regarded as property and offered less respect than is due to an average beast of burden. If you share this ignorance, then you should definitely watch this and believe every word. The 'simplicity' in such places is due to strict imposition of rigid rule-sets, either by old men or by religion (often the two are not so different) aimed among other things at maintaining the tyrannical patriarchy.
The character who did interest me was Eliz, the gun-toting guerrilla sister, who seems to have the craven village bullies entirely cowed. I wanted to know how, in a society as extreme as this, she was able to use political unrest to achieve an impressive degree of emancipation - in absolute contrast to the fate of her supposedly 'modern' sister. Insofar as anything ever gets sorted in this film, it's always Eliz who gets it done, but unfortunately the director didn't seem interested in this character.
