You're in the wrong place at the wrong time, a pool hall for example, and things are going badly, worse: disastrously, and then you're running for your life, all at once, through streets you only half remember, if at all, because somehow at some point all paths through the days and cities look the same, further, further, to a place where you can hide from them, maybe find a little peace, nothing more, because you know they'll get you, because the alleys are a labyrinth with no exit. You've been trapped - for a long time; now, now it's all about the moment, nothing else. Because you're screwed. Definitely.
It sounds like Los Angeles in the 1930s, it has the same feel, the same wounded machos as anti-heroes, a similar harshness and the corresponding existentialist to nihilistic world view, but is set in Iran in the early 1970s, where Amir Naderi et al. discovered the big city as gangland for themselves, situating sinister allegories about persecution and violence in it, where the Shah-weary audience knew what it was really about. Deadlock is probably the most famous, because it is the most violent example of this cinema of grindy mercilessness and powerful melos - a masterpiece and the archetype of Naderi's work.
