4 min readUpdated: Aug 15, 2025 11:22 AM IST
Tehran review: It’s raining spies everywhere you turn, but it’s in ‘Tehran’ that you actually get a sense of what the work entails– it could mean putting in long, hard hours in nondescript offices, and the field operations that are shown as fast-paced car-and-copter-chases in the movies is, in this John Abraham-starrer, mostly about learning how to hide in plain sight, even as the danger of betrayal looms at every step.
Abraham plays Rajeev Kumar, an intelligence officer who gets embroiled in the dirty business involving two foreign nations, Israel and Iran, on Indian soil. A blast in New Delhi results in the death of a little girl, a bystander with zero stakes in the long-standing conflict in the Middle East, and RK finds himself moving from the periphery to the centre. It’s no longer about the job; it is now personal.
The unravelling of the conspiracy, with the help of his team-mates Shailaja, Divya, Vijay (Neeru Bajwa, Manushi Chillar, Dinker Sharma) takes him from jousting with officials (Aly Khan, Quashik Mukherjee) in the Capital’s power corridors, to the streets of Tehran. Some suspects are rounded up and tortured– some of these scenes are brutal but matter-of-fact, business-as-usual to get crucial information out.
The plot, in trying to uncover the connections between the conspirators in Iran and Israel, does get confused and choppy in places. There is, for example, a horrifying sequence where an old man (whom we later learn is a rabbi) is mutilated and hammered to death with the murderer wearing a thin plastic overcoat to save his clothes from the blood. There’s a slogan about Palestine scrawled on the wall behind him, with many other lines beneath.
The film is set in 2012, when the car bomb goes off, and in the credits we see the line, ‘inspired by true events’. But the fact that it’s out now, with the Gaza conflict at its peak, is one of those coincidences that even the movies cannot dream up. It tells us that the Middle East has been on the boil for a long time: at this moment, an end doesn’t seem to be in sight, but after this incident, the warring nations have taken their dirty business off Indian soil. That’s what ‘Tehran’ leaves us with.
What Abraham, whose impassivity helps his character feel as real as it can when done with reel-drama (Chillar’s jagged hair-cut is very stylish, and not just for a spy), manages to pull off here is noteworthy. Interesting faces make up the ensemble. Characters In Tehran speak in Farsi, with subtitles below; he himself uses the language briefly with a degree of fluidity. And while it takes some time to warm up, the film finds its moral centre in the violent death of a spy: yes, it happened, and yes, it was while they were on duty, but it can leave a teammate stunned, and another can just hand out a pat on the shoulder, while fully understanding and sharing that pain, because the operation is still underway.
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This sequence made the movie for me. As did a tear running unobtrusively down RK’s eye. Spies die for their country and each death leaves an absence.
Tehran movie cast: John Abraham, Neeru Bajwa, Manushi Chillar, Madhurima Tuli, Aly Khan, Quashik Mukherjee, Dinker Sharma, Hadi Khanjanpour
Tehran movie director: Arun Gopalan
Tehran movie rating: Two and a half stars
Tehran is streaming on ZEE5.