Shakib (Mohsen Tanabandeh) uses one of his breaks at work to talk to Ladan (Mahsa Hejazi) over the phone. That encounter seems normal, but as these things go, nothing in Houman Seyyedi’s World War III is normal. A labourer, he signs up for work as a crew member in a production of a Holocaust film. There, he inadvertently gets promotions – from crew member to Holocaust Victim #2 to playing the Iranian version of Adolf Hitler. Promotions are usually great except that they don’t necessarily stop one’s previous life and unconventional habits from haunting them.

World War III gets some benefit of the doubt as it attempts to explain what I call ‘habits’. Ladan is Shakib’s sex worker of choice, running to him after finding out about his new place of work. After running away, her pimps track them down and claim that he owes them 100 million tomans ($1294.84 in Canadian dollars). He basically asks his bosses for money, an action that alienates him from the rest of the crew. But at a certain point, Shakib even says that he ‘has nothing more to lose’ and will do anything.

Depicting an Iranian version of Adolf Hitler is offensive yet it’s also what interests me here. Hitler is, so far, the last person to traumatize the world as a whole, a reason why films keep showing him. It’s also interesting to see his story intersect with that of the kind of Iranian cinema that World War III is trying to show viewers. Much of Iranian cinema is plucking someone out of obscurity who will give a great performance. This raises, then, some questions about what Shakib learns in the process of embodying Hitler.

Although perhaps, World War III‘s B-plot focus on Hitler over his atrocities is a blind spot. Sure, it depicts history’s biggest loser and its tenuous similarities with Shakib, a loser of contemporary days. The idea of Hitler is an ‘easy’ sell, as most people know all too well, but it’s not as easy to sell Shakib as someone down and out. It only establishes the idea that he is content to do day labour and have strange friends. The film, sadly, can’t connect that to the man who eventually agrees to pay money to pimps.

Watching a film crew shove extras into fake gas chambers can change how a person behaves. A larger change happens within Shakib, when the film crew does something that puts Ladan’s safety in limbo. In this perspective, the film may make more sense, but it’s too bad that World War III isn’t as simple as my reductive version. It uses one contrivance after another instead of focusing on its problematic protagonist. Shakib’s early defenseless nature also make the film he’s in feel like an unwatchable energy pit.

World War III comes to OVID, uncut and commercial free.