You’d have to be fairly well-versed in Iranian cinema to know director Panah Panahi is the son of that country’s notable filmmaker Jafar Panahi (Taxi). Still, one needn’t be a globe-traipsing cinephile to understand the younger Panahi’s first-ever feature, Hit the Road, is a masterwork of differing familial relationships and a tangible, long-lasting pang of existential dread.

In Panahi’s major film debut, we follow an unnamed family on a car trip through the countryside outside of Tehran. There’s the stoic father (Hassan Madjooni), whose furtive nature is punctuated by cigarettes, mystery phone calls and circuitous affections; the romantic 6-year-old (Rayan Sarlak) who just had his cellphone taken away and who bellows painfully that if he misses a call from his teacher, whom he is dating in his mind, she’ll dump him; the pained but outwardly emotive mother (an electric Pantea Panahiha, who represents the best of Panahi’s opus); and the tortured older brother (Amin Simiar), whom we learn the trip is about, even if we don’t learn why until it’s too late to detach.

Road lives in the expansive unsaid things between family members, even as Sarlak’s young boy fills the silence with youthful chatter. Much of the film takes place in a car, and the family shares knowing glances while its youngest member tends to the sick dog who’s also along for the ride, offers a ride to an ostensibly injured bicyclist and asks the parents the kinds of rapid-fire questions kids seem to invariably ask. Only the older brother seems unenthused, though his parents get there with him through the course of the odyssey, even as they must defuse tensions for their youngest.

How a car can feel so suffocating yet so expansive fades after a time, but brief respites and new landscapes feel freeing though at odds with the crushing nature of the errand: Eventually we learn the family must smuggle the eldest brother out of Iran, though we never learn why. Once we learn escape is the objective, however, it makes everything the parents do and say in the film’s earlier moments all the more meaningful, and any further specifics would only have distracted from the real crux of the matter: Families struggle to express love openly, but they’ll show you in the most curious ways.

Panahi relishes the simpler, quieter moments, and he transitions from feeling to feeling—or perhaps act to act—with characters breaking the fourth wall. Or so it seems. Once you understand the father, you hate him for playing cool, but get it in a way; Panahiha, though, steals the production, even from the precocious Sarlak, who turns in one of the best child performances in recent memory. One almost pities Simiar’s character for having to suffer with that which the family cannot understand. Still, he does the comforting in the end, at least for a moment. There’s no comfort for the mother, however, who steals a lock of her son’s hair, who fights back screams, who falls to her knees, eyes trained directly on us, and openly weeps. It’s not easy, but it sure is beautiful.

9

+The cast; the quiet; the first and final moments

-Some questions left unanswered

Hit the Road

Directed by Panahi

With Panahiha, Sarlak, Simiar and Madjooni

Center for Contemporary Arts, NR, 93 min.