Taste of Cherry (1997)

Taste of Cherry is the kind of film that feels less like a story being told at you and more like a quiet, urgent conversation you’re invited to sit in on—minimalist on the surface, but echoing with big, human questions. Abbas Kiarostami turns a man’s drive through the outskirts of Tehran into something hypnotic and profoundly intimate, where each encounter carries the weight of compassion, discomfort, and the fragile bargaining we do with ourselves. The tone is spare, contemplative, and unexpectedly tender, finding flashes of affirmation without ever resorting to melodrama or easy answers. It’s not for viewers who need plot momentum or clear resolutions, but if you’re open to ambiguity and cinema that trusts silence as much as speech, this one can linger in your mind like a memory.

Taste of Cherry is trying to be a quiet, philosophical meditation on suicide and the small, stubborn reasons people choose to keep living, using long drives and spare conversations instead of plot twists. The problem is that it’s deliberately withholding and emotionally distant: you get very little backstory, minimal dramatic escalation, and a pace that can feel like watching real time pass in a car. If you need character psychology spelled out, a clear narrative payoff, or even basic closure, this will likely test your patience—especially with an ending that refuses to “complete” the story in the usual way. But if you’re open to austerity, stillness, and big questions delivered with almost no cinematic hand-holding, it can be quietly haunting and oddly soothing.