Black Rabbit, White Rabbit Film Review

Shahram Mokri’s captivating fifth feature, Black Rabbit, White Rabbit, plays around with film as a storytelling medium with fascinating and engaging results.

This endlessly entertaining, wildly daring film will alienate some with its lofty ambitions and meta nature, but the sheer imagination on screen will captivate many that see it.

After a swift opening involving a gun trade gone wrong, Black Rabbit, White Rabbit introduces a heavily bandaged woman, Sara (Hasti Mohammai), roaming the large grounds of her house. The camera sweeps along with her as she goes in and out. But despite the size of the house, Sara’s freedom is limited; her bank cards have been confiscated by her abusive husband, whose only conversation towards her is about how bad her bandages smell. Much of the rest of Black Rabbit, White Rabbit centres around the fact that a prop gun has been mistakenly replaced with a real gun. The obvious parallels to the fatal shooting of Halyna Hutchins on the set of Rust (2024) leaves a somewhat bad taste to the film, but due to its severe ambiguity, it isn’t always an issue.

From this intriguing opener, Black Rabbit, White Rabbit moves into its other branching stories, with Mokri playfully skipping from story to story, from film set to film set, with an unabashed glee. The way he sets up moments that have a big payoff later in the film, as we witness the same scenes from different angles, is spectacular, and on the same level as the singular zombie film One Cut of the Dead (2017). It is rich, dense filmmaking with many layers, despite the fact it takes some time to get going and reach these notable highs. Where One Cut of the Dead lasted only just over 90-minutes, Black Rabbit, White Rabbit clocks in at 139-minutes. The length is noticeable, particularly in the film’s opening sections, although it is always highly watchable. There is just a bit too much scene-setting.

Nevertheless, this is terrific filmmaking on many different technical levels. Morteza Gheidi’s (Nahid) cinematography stands out, with most scenes conducted in audacious single shots, all of them expertly choreographed and acted by its superb ensemble. Mokri even plays with language; much of the film is in Tajik and Russian, but there is one dynamite scene where two doppelganger characters interchange between the former language and Italian with amusing results. In Mokri’s eyes, the whole world is a film set, and we’re never quite sure if what we’re watching is real or not.

Almost inevitably, Black Rabbit, White Rabbit can be endlessly confusing. In fact, Mokri seems to recognise and relish this fact; he casts prop man Babak (Babak Karimi, A Separation) as a weary onlooker across each of the stories. Each time Babak feels faint with confusion, the viewer feels it too. Where Kiarostami excelled at metatextual filmmaking, Mokri sometimes stumbles. The director and his co-writer Nasim Ahmadpour (Invasion) frequently meld their screenplay into something cohesive—when they do, the film soars—but they also leave many loose ends that can be frustrating. There is a chaos to the structure that can be baffling and not always rewarding, but ultimately, you just have to throw your hands up, like Babak does, and accept the ambiguity. Exhausting it might be, but that’s part of the fun.

Black Rabbit, White Rabbit will be screened at the BFI London Film Festival on 13-14 October, 2025.