Dir: Ghasideh Golmakani | Iran Drama 2026
Dressing up the absurd
Head to Head is an ironic send-up of religious garb. On the surface, it looks almost playful: a film set populated by men in skirts and headscarves, fussing over costumes, complaining about the heat and squabbling with their director. But beneath the deliberately comic, slightly surreal, surface lies something much darker — the everyday absurdity of a system in which clothing can become an instrument of control.
Golmakani’s ingenious premise is simple. Bahar, an Iranian woman director, casts men in her film and makes them wear the clothes and head coverings imposed on women. What begins as an eccentric piece of filmmaking gradually becomes an experiment in empathy. The men discover that rules which can look merely theoretical from the outside become considerably less abstract when they are the ones expected to live by them.
The visual style keeps playing with that contradiction. The film-within-the-film has the bright, artificial quality of a constructed cinematic world, while the circumstances surrounding its production are anything but playful. Cameras are everywhere, recording not simply the supposed movie but the tensions, arguments and power struggles behind it. The result is a kind of hall-of-mirrors cinema: we are watching a film about people making a film, while that filmmaking process itself becomes the evidence.
And Golmakani knows exactly how funny the situation can look. The men’s irritation with their costumes and their wounded pride provide genuine comic relief. Yet the joke keeps turning back on them. What initially seems ridiculous is gradually revealed to be the point. If the clothing feels oppressive to men after a short period, what does it mean for women who have no choice about wearing it?
That reversal gives Head to Head its particular bite. It doesn’t simply tell its audience that a double standard exists; it constructs one and then makes its male characters inhabit it. The film’s irony is therefore formal as well as political: an artificial cinematic exercise starts to resemble reality with uncomfortable precision.
There is also something wonderfully self-reflexive about Golmakani making a film about a woman who has to find ingenious ways of making a film. The restrictions placed on the fictional production echo the restrictions surrounding the real act of filmmaking. The camera becomes both witness and accomplice, capturing a rebellion that has to disguise itself as entertainment.
At its best, Head to Head understands that satire doesn’t always need to shout. Sometimes the most effective provocation is simply to make the absurd visible — and then let the audience laugh before realising what, exactly, they are laughing at.
A striking TIFF discovery, and a particularly smart example of cinema using its own artifice to expose the artifice of power.
TORONTO FILM FESTIVAL 2026