The Patience Stone

After her astonishing work in Asghar Farhadi’s About Elly, Golshifteh Farahani’s performance in The Patience Stone confirms her status as one of the finest actors currently working. She plays a young Afghan woman who spends her days tending to her recently comatose husband as bombs fall on her village and fighting takes place in the streets. Now that the power dynamic in this marriage has suddenly changed, this woman finds the courage to tell her unresponsive husband all of the secrets she has kept hidden for years.

Atiq Rahimi’s adaptation (with the help of Jean-Claude Carrière) of his own novel at times feels too verbose and stage-bound to flow as a film, but its portrayal of a repressed woman finding the strength to become the person she has long wanted to be is undeniably powerful. The Patience Stone contains a number of engrossing scenes and encounters with supporting characters that don’t always play out as you’d expect, while Farahani – in what is frequently a one-woman show – is constantly surprising and impressive. [Philip Concannon]