Chess of the Wind (1976) 2021

In a stately aristocratic house, the death of Khanom Bozorg leaves her wheelchair-bound daughter, Aghdas, to mourn within the vast halls of the Moshir ad-Dowleh Mansion. She shares the space with her mother’s widower, Hadji Amoo, and his two nephews, Ramezan and Shaban. The arrangement is uneasy from the start: Ramezan is betrothed to Aghdas, but the marriage promises more wealth than affection, and Aghdas quickly becomes wary of her fiancé’s true intentions. The household is completed by a devoted maid, Kanizak, who looks after Aghdas and quietly forms a bond with Shaban. Intercut scenes of washerwomen gossiping weave a social undercurrent, filling in the history of Aghdas and Hadji Amoo with rumors, memories, and whispered judgments.

As the days unfold, both Aghdas and Hadji Amoo grow certain they are entitled to inherit Khanom Bozorg’s house. A shared sense of grievance fuses into a reckless plan: one evening, Aghdas and Kanizak slip into Hadji Amoo’s private room and burn the house deeds, removing his name from the documents. The act sets off a sequence of confrontations between stepfather and stepdaughter, each clash underscoring a deeper hunger for control and survival. Aghdas, emboldened or desperate, hatches a more drastic scheme: she privately signals to Ramezan her intention to kill Hadji Amoo, masking it as something else and letting him believe he remains in the family’s good graces.

The air grows heavier as Hadji Amoo prays in his chamber, and Aghdas is wheeled in by Kanizak. With a silver flail, she strikes Hadji Amoo, and the household descends into a grim sequence of actions—Kanizak and Ramezan drag the fallen man to the cellar and stash his body in a bottomless jar, a macabre plan to dissolve it later with nitric acid at Aghdas’s command. The home shivers with the potential of discovery, yet the immediate threat seems contained, at least for a moment.

Weeks later, two creditors arrive with a police commissar to press Hadji Amoo for a debt. Aghdas insists she has seen nothing of him for days, but the commissar’s sharper memory tells a different tale: he saw Hadji Amoo on the street only recently. Panic flares as Kanizak and Ramezan escort the men down to the cellar. They search the jars for a body and come up empty-handed, and the pair leave as quietly as they came. The tension intensifies: is Hadji Amoo truly dead, or has he found a way to loom over the house from some shadowed corner?

Aghdas’s paranoia deepens. The rumor mill returns in the form of a traveling musical troupe, who claim to have seen Hadji Amoo in public, and her fear snowballs into illness. Kanizak persuades Aghdas to travel briefly away from the mansion to visit a nearby holy site, hoping distance will ease the danger. Yet the quiet outside cannot silence the murmur inside: at night, laughter echoes from the cellar, and Aghdas, driven by a mixture of resolve and dread, fetches an antique pistol and descends to the basement. There, she discovers Hadji Amoo and Kanizak relaxing together in the bath. In a decisive act, she shoots Hadji Amoo, but the shock proves too much for her, and she collapses from a heart attack.

With Hadji Amoo dead and the plan seemingly undone, Kanizak and Shaban plot to live off the inheritance together. It appears they had staged Hadji Amoo’s death to reap the rewards in concert, their partnership a fragile cooperation built on shared ambition. However, the alliance fractures when Kanizak learns that Shaban does not intend to marry her, and the two argue upstairs. Returning to the cellar, Ramezan discovers the tangled bodies and the betrayal of his cousin. Enraged by Shaban’s treachery, he climbs the stairs and shoots him dead, fracturing the would-be family further.

In the closing moments, Kanizak leaves the mansion behind, carrying only a young boy and Aghdas’s elderly nanny. The camera lingers on the city beyond the walls, a quiet, lingering reminder of lives consumed by greed, fear, and the fragile threads that hold a family together. The film ends on a note of haunting consequence, suggesting that the inheritance, rather than securing a future, has already rewritten the fates of everyone involved.