Outcry (Bidad, 2025) ‘Karlovy Vary’ Movie Review: Iranian Dissident Drama Rings Out Loud

In Soheil Beiraghi’s “Outcry” (“Bidad,” 2025), the twentysomething Seti (Sarvin Zabetian), who’s mostly relegated to backup or chorus singing, wants her voice to chime out from the rest. She persistently demands it, but her requests are dismissed. Instead, it’s categorically underlined for her that the male voices will always override. In Iran, it cannot be a level playing field for all genders, as imposed by the administration. The latter may only privately practice or among themselves in groups. They are all lumped together. Any single female singer is barred from distinguishing herself and standing out. However, Seti is hungry for more, her passion undimmable.

She lands a gig at a nightclub but runs out of luck quickly as it gets raided. Even illicitly, her dream gets rudely snubbed. But she refuses to quieten, buckle down. She snips her hair and goes almost rogue, having had enough of systemic erasure. Snaking into the dark of the stairwell, she starts belting out to her heart’s content. Gradually, passers-by are intrigued and capture her on their phones. It becomes her recurring space of performance. Naturally, ramifications kick in.

She mesmerizes strangers as much as attracts danger. Soon, authorities come looking, seeking to expunge the supposed threat of a girl who strays. There’s jailing, the more extreme manifestations of consequence. Amidst this ruckus swoops in on a stranger (Amir Jadidi). The two take off in his car and spend a few nights. Though it never gets properly intimate, scenes between them accrue a teasing, pert undercurrent. Beiraghi invests these with a crackling, electric charge. There’s a thrilling edge here, as the two reveal themselves to one another and yet not quite. It’s smouldering and unpredictable, Jadidi and Zabetian lacing this dynamic with something far more complex and spikier than conventional anticipation.

Outcry (Bidad, 2025) — A still from “Outcry” (“Bidad,” 2025)

A seething, stubbornly certain heroine, Seti’s appeal is indelible, cutting through seemingly cemented barriers of subordination and compliance. Instead, she becomes the mark of a teeming underground network of dissidents and rebels. The adamant defiance streaking through “Bidad” has a strength and vitality which we all must insist on. The power here punches above any feeling that Seti will allow herself to be beaten into submission. Unapologetic and ferocious, she will pursue her ambitions, even if they are antithetical to how her country sees women. She dares to prise out her own space amidst her society’s normative pushbacks. She looks eye to eye with eve-teasers on the road and calls them out.

Beiraghi, who has also written the film, chafes at fixed homogenisations. Rather, the Iran we encounter bursts with people espousing strong political differences, ideologically sparring on received diktats. Between Seti and the elders around her dispensing free advice, there are chasms as to what space a woman has for expression in Iran. Both are at loggerheads. Seti’s mother, Homeyra (Leili Rashidi), buoys her to keep on. She often slips into drunk misery and torment. Seti struggles to shake her into waking comprehension. These scenes are wrenching, as she helplessly hauls up her mother and jostles off the mounting pressure of silencing. Seti doesn’t wholly abdicate all rules. Neither does she, however, give herself over entirely to how the regime permits and prefers women to behave, aspiring only to a certain way.

“Bidad” accumulates into an unflinching, sobering paean to resistance, fronting it as essential and undeniable in a repressive society. As alone Seti thinks of herself, the film reassuringly opens up, weaving in other misfits and rebels coming together to shove away conformity. Beiraghi folds in a bit of grungy textures to prop up subterranean radical individuals and groups operating with tenacious selfhood. Grounding it all is Zabetian, whose performance gains a singular, trenchant fury. Her gaze is blistering, challenging.

Beiraghi maximises the valence of Seti’s voice, foisting against the proscribed. She seeks to transcend, eke out her own individual career, irrespective of the system putting her down, negating what she has to sing. The film gathers her unflappable, fearless conviction into an anthem for the disobedient, and everyone who wants to break out. Seti’s gusto, pockets of solidarity propping her up, are of a kind that can rally many to live as insolently and independently.