The Enclose (Harim)

 There are plenty of micro-budget horror movies out there. Many are easily accessible in the far reaches of the genre lists on streaming services, and I understand in the States they all fester within something called Tubi. I tend to avoid them, as there are a lot of deeply shitty films in this space and many seem to only be made to cynically gather whatever meagre earnings are to be made from adventurous /undiscriminating viewers... but sometimes curiosity wins out.

 2009 Iranian horror film The Enclose (originally known as Zone, apparently) seems to have come to reside in that space. It is, whatever other flaws it may have, not cynical - there's clearly a lot of effort put behind it, and that's usually enough for me to at least get through to the credits.

 The credits roll over a 1966-set prologue shot in cheesy modern-day digital approximation of black and white old-timey stock where a bunch of archaeologists discover a tablet, and a little kid, shortly before being attacked by Alan Moore. I think.
 Cut to 2009, where detective Mohebi (Hamid Farroukhnezhad?*) lies alone in a double bed, sadly fondling his wedding ring and casting longing glances to the empty space at his side. The next shot he's sitting at a sofa, looking at family pictures.

 This, by the way, points at the film's single biggest flaw; Writer/director Reza Khatibi has clearly internalized a lot of western film language, and unfortunately that includes a lot of shitty visual storytelling clichés like the ones above. There's a lot of this - and crappy wall-to-wall horror clichés - throughout the film; I got the sense that given that it's a slow, investigative tale, the script (by the director and Mehdi Hosseni-Nejad) deploys these things to keep viewer interest, but it would definitely have been much better off with a subtler approach.

 Major Mohebi is rousted from his mourning by a new case where two British tourists were found near a forest in the middle of nowhere in northern Iran - one of them dead, with no obvious wounds, the other one alive but catatonic, and missing a leg.

 The case is the backbone for the movie, and it's an engaging mystery that soon involves a mysterious village, a haunted forest, and the detective's personal history. The investigation itself is well-handled, although it's often derailed by narrative convenience; An early questioning of a key witness, for example,  misses an obvious detail that's only properly investigated much later, when plot development can better accommodate it. And all throughout, in the margins, there are cheap horror-movie tactics galore, liberally sprinkled all over, most of them not effective at all.
 The final explanation makes it clear that the script was indeed throwing out bullshit like crazy and leaves several key questions hanging, but even then (and despite it hinging on an ill-defined 'everything is connected' conceit) it's still got a fairly cool idea at its centre.

 The director and cinematographer Mohammed Ahmadi are constantly looking to inject some energy into the movie. This is both a good and a bad thing. On the plus side, there are a lot of unconventional angles, top-down tracking shots, and interesting takes in general; a lot of elbow grease is applied, and that's a rare and much appreciated thing here in the far reaches of low-budget productions.

 On the other side, as previously mentioned the film constantly includes poorly integrated, cheesy genre trappings, as if to remind you that it is indeed a horror movie. Some of them are well crafted, but even the good ones end up being distracting. And some of them are unwittingly funny - like the constant 'scary sound effects' (as per the subtitles!), some teleporting village people, scene-bombing Alan Moore, or the multiple instances where the characters within a scene seem to react to a musical sting in the soundtrack; that made me chuckle.

 Is the movie worth it? Well, yes and no. I don't regret watching it. As horror it's a bust, but I've definitely seen worse, and there's plenty to like: Hamid Farroukhnezhad(?) gives a fine, soulful performance; The specificities of Iranian culture give the proceeds a little more interest that a western movie would have had, even though aside from a couple of bits its mystic elements don't seem that tied to either local culture or to Muslim religion.

 The most important thing is that even though the mystery doesn't fully cohere by the end, I still found it engaging, if a bit boring on the moment-to-moment. With a bit more restraint, and maybe a little more development, it might have actually been good.

*: There's very little information about this movie online and the credits are in Persian, so I may have him wrong.