"Oblivion Verses" is a quiet film that probably slipped under the radar of most English speaking audiences, but it's well worth the watch. Presented in very picturesque, very stationary shots (there is practically no camera movement),it's almost like a series of living postcards through which we follow an old man's strange quest.

Our protagonist (who has no name) is an old man who works at a small village morgue. He and his coworker, a gravedigger, spend their workdays recounting the stories of the dead whom they have buried, 1000 in total. Then one day a 1001st body mysteriously shows up: the corpse of a young woman who was murdered by the government-sponsored militia. Our nameless hero realizes it's just a matter of time before the militia comes back to grab the body and dump her in a mass unmarked grave in the hills. So he takes it upon himself, as his last act before shutting down the morgue, to give her a proper burial. It's not easy.

Although there are elements of violence (all handled off-camera) as well as an overtly morbid and disturbing theme, the film is surprisingly poetic and nostalgic. The stillness of the camera forces us to pay attention to the entire field of view, not just what the camera wants us to see, as conventional pans & zooms would dictate. And the slow moving pace--literally 'slow moving' as the old man hobbles about somewhat rheumatically--causes us to absorb every detail and hang on every word that is said.

Although the plot is very interesting, almost like a murder mystery thriller, you shouldn't approach this as a straightforward plot-driven Hollywood type movie. The power of this film is in the small details and excellent script. I absolutely loved the conversations between the old man and the grave digger. They add some fun comedic spice and deadpan strangeness. In a weird way it reminded me of the banter between John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson playing 2 hired killers in "Pulp Fiction", except here we have a pair of old timers chatting as they plant dead bodies in the ground.

Visually it's a feast. Every detail seems to be meticulously laid out for us, especially in the indoor scenes like the bureaucrat's office which is magnificently cluttered with books, papers and alarm clocks that keep ringing (though he can never remember why). If you notice things like dramatic lighting and shadows, you'll be blown away at the morgue scenes and a really fun scene in the morgue library: a labyrinthine tangle of aisles and shelves where you need a long piece of string to find your way out of. Other shots of exteriors and the cemetery are enormous and open. I really meant it when I compared this film to a series of postcards.

This quiet, motionless style of filmmaking reminded me of the European masters Bela Tarr, Emir Kusturica, and even some of Milos Forman's early work ("The Firemen's Ball"),or if you're familiar with modern Japanese cinema think of Takeshi Kitano ("Fireworks", "A Scene at the Sea"). An American comparison might be the early work of Mike Nichols ("Catch-22"). However this film is a true original. This is director Alireza Khatami's debut feature, and I have to say it's one of the most impressive directoral debuts I've seen.

"The world is gone," wrote Paul Celan "I must carry you." These words haunt and embolden the scenic poetry that unravels in this enchanting film. An elderly cemetery undertaker with curious scars and a remarkably particular memory, tends to a little lettuce garden as well as the graves, histories and memories of people long gone. Strange things begin to happen including a visit by secret police in the night with the body of an unknown young woman. The whale earrings she wears are revealing, for whales are earth's messengers and their eerie calls begin to resound in the depths of the sky. A storm is gathering and while the elderly man seems to have a central role to play in it, he does not appear overly concerned.

The trauma and darkness of past and present oppression combine with the grace and transcendence of the human and natural world in this brilliant, beautiful puzzle of a story. It is lovely as it is heartbreaking. Ambient sounds of footsteps, cats, crickets, doves, stray dogs, bees and more, are infused throughout and comprise much of the wordless yet telling dialogue. The main actor is perfect for the role and his stellar performance carries the film. While the film is slow paced and obscure, it is thought-provoking and wonderful. The Iranian director chose Chile as the setting for the film, which really could be anywhere. Seen at the Toronto International Film Festival.

What a delightful film "Oblivion Verses" is with the perfectly cast Spanish actor Juan Margallo, born in Spain in 1940, who carries the entire film at ease by speaking very little, telling the story mostly by his wonderfully expressive facial expressions.

So as the previous reviewer wrote, the elderly cemetery undertaker can't remember his name, but he remembers pretty much everything else down to photographic details. He now lives a quiet life by attending his little lettuce garden and taking care of an ancient morgue, beautifully filmed somewhere in Chile to create an atmosphere that doesn't quite exist in Europe or America. (The Iranian director Alireza Khatami operates mostly between France and United States.) In fact, the building of the administration office of the cemetery looks like an Aztec monument, which gives a rather futuristic dystopian impression.

The elderly man then somehow gets involved with wrong government officials, taken to a remote place, and gets shot rather early on in the film. This is where you get the idea that this is really a delightful fairy tale in which he would simply walk back home through the night over curious landscapes, blindfolded, his hands still tied in the back. When he finally gets home, he just takes a shower and goes to bed.

When the elderly man gets buried alive into the basement of the morgue where everybody gets mysteriously lost, our protagonist once again simply walks out of it by breaking open what appears to be a coffin in the cemetery in the back of the morgue, taking out 4 or 5 other men with him who seem to have been also lost. When he finally gets home, he then just takes a shower and goes to bed.

Toward the end of the film when the elderly man tries to break into the morgue from which he was forced out, his long lost son appears to help him. You know that he was dead long ago if you were watching the film carefully, because there was a police report a little earlier in the film that bore his name that the elderly man would alter. But the only indication of his dead son's appearance is communicated by Juan Margallo's character by simply dropping his crowbar from incredulity, frozen for a moment, shaken for the first time. No words are spoken, but all somehow feels natural and moving (if you get it),and he leaves the morgue by a hearse without any further interaction with his son, perhaps only being content that he has seen him. But he does look at him once more in the rearview mirror as he leaves, and the mirror curiously turns into black & white.

The elderly man is curiously unconcerned with all this or the unspecified turbulent political situations that have brought in many dead bodies to his ancient morgue. But he does become determined to give a proper burial service to a body of a young woman, and this incidentally is the backbone of this film. But it doesn't really matter, because it's a sort of film that consists of many interesting plots one after another that keep the viewers amazed (if you get most of them). There are also stunningly beautifully shots through out this film that might be missed if you are not careful, and for that matter, all the shots are deliberate and highly calculated with fairly clear messages. There are also humorous scenes where lemons roll down on a street on perfect trajectories, or a cat who comes out from a window and poses at a perfect position right in the middle of the film, all of which just wouldn't happen unless the director has shot dozens of takes looking for perfect compositions. (Or are they computer aided graphics? You can't really tell nowadays, can you?) Then there is the whale that flies in the sky, riding the storm, bringing the rain even into the interior of a post office: I can't quite understand what it was that the elderly man was trying to mail, but the flying whale clearly has an issue with it.

Finally, if you don't quite understand the ending of the film, you might recall the taxi driver who brings a guest to the morgue at the beginning of the film and announces, "It is the end". But then another taxi driver who brings our protagonist to the beach toward the end of the film announces, "This is the beginning." There is also this blind gravedigger who tells a story every time he digs a hole, and his very first story is about a 76 years old man who irons his blue shirt and leaves home to catch the earliest bus next morning... The gravedigger then concludes his story by saying, "It's a great ending for a film."