Doctor in Duty: Honest Review — Is It Worth Watching? | 0.0/10

Doctor in Duty is a politically charged short that swings for the fences on abortion and female autonomy in Iran, but ten minutes simply isn’t enough time to let the story breathe into something truly devastating. Soudabeh Kamrani’s film demands respect for its courage, yet lands somewhere between urgent statement and incomplete sketch.

Doctor in Duty: The plot (no spoilers)

Doctor in Duty traps a woman’s health specialist in unwanted overnight hospital rounds, where a teenage girl arrives seeking an abortion—a decision that collides with institutional pressure, moral doubt, and the doctor’s own exhaustion. The premise is stripped bare: no melodrama, no artificial tension, just the raw friction between a vulnerable teenager and a tired physician caught between her oath and her conscience in a hostile legal environment.

The film operates in murky territory, blending documentary realism with surreal visual passages that suggest the doctor’s fractured mental state under duress. There’s no comfortable resolution waiting—the movie is hostile to sentiment, which feels deliberate but also leaves you wondering if Kamrani’s vision was fully realized in such a compressed timeframe, or if the short format itself became a constraint rather than a choice.

Acting & direction

Marzieh Hasani Josheghani carries the film with a performance that’s all tired eyes and clenched jaw, finding profound weariness in silence rather than monologue. Shervin Vahdat and Mehri Aleagha anchor the human stakes, though neither gets enough screen time to fully crystallize their characters into anything beyond thematic vessels for the film’s argument about autonomy and coercion.

Kamrani’s direction favors stillness and discomfort—long takes where nothing “happens” in the conventional sense, but everything unsaid hangs in the air like cigarette smoke. The cinematography captures hospital fluorescents as something almost sepulchral, and there are moments of genuine surrealism that suggest the doctor’s psychological unraveling, though the pacing sometimes feels more like activism than storytelling, and the score underlines emotion where a quieter hand might have gutted us more thoroughly.

The strengths

• Thematically fearless: the film refuses to soften its stance on reproductive rights or pretend there are easy answers to impossible circumstances.
• Visual language occasionally transcends the didactic—there are surreal passages that feel honest about mental fracture and institutional violence without ever spelling it out.
• The refusal to sentimentalize either the doctor or the teenager keeps the story morally complex instead of reducing everyone to heroes and villains.

The weaknesses

• Ten minutes is a brutally short format for a drama this weighted, leaving character development and emotional stakes feeling more like sketches than fully realized relationships.
• The film occasionally tilts toward manifesto and away from cinema—visual storytelling surrenders to message, and the surreal sequences, while striking, feel ornamental rather than essential to understanding these people’s internal lives.

Who should watch it

Seek this out if you’re drawn to uncompromising political drama, Iranian cinema, or films that treat abortion without sentimentality or prudishness. This isn’t prestige television comfort—it’s closer to the agitprop spirit of early Kiarostami or the ethical rigor of Panahi, though constrained by its brevity. If you want narrative catharsis or character arcs, look elsewhere; if you want cinema that refuses to look away from suffering and systemic cruelty, this lands.

Final verdict

Doctor in Duty is a film that matters more than it satisfies—it’s a necessary provocation wrapped in the body of a short, which means it reads less as complete work and more as urgent cry. Kamrani deserves credit for the courage of her convictions and the visual intelligence on display, yet the compressed format undermines the emotional depth the subject demands. It’s worth seeing, especially if you care about cinema that takes real risks on real issues, but don’t expect transcendence—expect a formal statement delivered with unflinching conviction, which is valuable, but not quite the same thing as art that will haunt you.

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