Hit the Road (2022), directed by Panah Panahi. Streaming at home on Sunday, January 1.

This subtle story of an Iranian family’s long road trip to deliver a fugitive son across a northern border is a beautiful, heartbreaking and ultimately frustrating movie. I’m glad I saw it and wished I liked it more. There are four people, a family, in the car: Mom (Pantea Panahiha), Dad (Mohammad Hassan Madjooni), the Kid (Rayan Sarlak), who screams throughout the picture, and the older son (Amin Simiar) whose need to get out of the country literally and figuratively drives this movie.

There’s a ruminative, melancholy feel to this film, but an alarming lack of tension–on numerous occasions, it’s noted that they all agreed to leave their cell phones behind, only the Dad has not, which does not result in any consequences. The Kid is precocious, to put it nicely, but to put it bluntly he’s a pain the ass throughout. They’re keeping the sad news from him, but I don’t know if the director has ever met kids or has kids, but in situations like kids are typically aware of something, and they tend to go a bit berserk because of the withheld information.

Also, I couldn’t help but think about how differently things might have been in Iran if America hadn’t sent the country spiraling down this rabbit hole of evil with the CIA-backed coup d’état of Mohammad Mosaddegh’s socialist government, which ushered in the horrible years of the Shah followed by the horrible years of the current oppressive government. I mean, really, much of this terror is our doing, and that just stuck with me as I was watching this.

I loved the dry humor and the numerous references to 2001: A Space Odyssey (including a really sly reference to the famous “Stargate” scene), even as I don’t know why that film was evoked. But ultimately, like Kubrick’s great Shining and the awful Little Miss Sunshine, I got no sense that this was a family–just four actors in a car (most of the time), putting in great work but not in any way displaying the genuine chemistry of a family.

Also, I wish filmmakers and writers would stop killing dogs in order to evoke feeling. Please, it’s so cheap.