LONDON: Poised in a pitch-black room, the camera is focussed on the mail slot of an anonymous front door. Outside, someone is stuffing something through the slot, allowing sunlight to pierce the gloom. As you might expect when a closed door stands between yourself and the outside world, voices and ambient noise are distant and ill-defined.

The camera seems to approach the door then and, quite seamlessly, the lit mail slot transforms into the reflection of car headlights against the inside of a tunnel. The muffled voices become the screaming laughter of young people who’ve stuck their heads out the windows as their car plunges through the tunnel.

This inspired visual sequence opens Asghar Farhadi’s “About Elly.” The film follows a party of 30-something Tehranis during their weekend excursion to a cottage on the shore of the Caspian Sea. 

The masterfully wrought start lingers as the film unfolds. You wait to see how Farhadi and his director of photography (the renowned Hossein Jafarian) will guide the film back to the moment of light and communication penetrating the darkness through a closed door. 

They never do. The film closes with a different, if equally effective, tableau. It may be a mark of Farhadi’s mischievous wit, though, that the cottage his characters find themselves in is, as one of them notes, “without proper doors or windows.”

“About Elly” had simultaneous world premiers at Tehran’s Fajr and the Berlinale in February. A certified hit on the festival circuit – having won best director prizes in Berlin and Tehran and the award for best narrative feature at Tribeca a couple of months later – the film enjoyed its UK premier at the London Film Festival last week.

“About Elly” has been a surprise for audiences with casual exposure to highbrow Iranian film and have come to expect gorgeous cinematography without much discernable plot (a-la mid-career Abbas Kiarostami), neo-real-ish social dramas with amateur actors (Mohsen Makh­malbaf’s earlier work or that of Jafar Panahi) or a bit of both (as with Bahman Ghobadi’s films).

Though he is allowed some inspired cinematographic moments, Jafarian doesn’t indulge in much broad-canvas rendering of landscape. “About Elly” is a plot- and character-driven film that could fit comfortably on stage. Jafarian’s lens follows Farhadi’s ensemble cast of young urbanites and the emotional baggage they fitfully unpack as they’re caught up in the plot’s web of good-natured deception and manipulation.

The brains of the operation is Sepideh (Golshifteh Farahani). Energetic and meddlesome in that good-hearted way peculiar to matchmakers, she’s planned a weekend outing with a circle of young couples and their kids. She doesn’t necessarily think things all the way through, as the party discovers when they arrive at their destination to find there’s no place for them to stay.

The object of Sepideh’s scheming is to thrust together two friends who don’t know each other. Ahmad (Shahab Hosseini), a good-looking divorcee back for a brief visit from Germany, is part of her circle of pals. Elly (Taraneh Alidoosti), the pretty nursery school teacher who minds her kids, is a stranger to the group. 

Sepideh is adept at improvised social manipulation. While wrangling with the lady who rents out the cottages, she tells her that Ahmad and Elly are newlyweds and secures a neglected beachfront chalet for the weekend.

It’s an open secret that Ahmad and Elly are expected to hit it off. He’s good humored about the whole thing, but she seems more reluctant to be along – presumably because, as she tells Ahmad, her mother has just had open-heart surgery.

Some sparks do fly between the nascent couple during their first evening together but, when the others begin to make nudge-nudge, wink-wink jokes with Ahmad, it seems natural that Elly be uncomfortable. Speaking to her mother on the phone, she asks not to let anyone know she’s out of town, suggesting she simply say she has no idea where her daughter is. She then tells her host that she intends to return to Tehran the next day. Sepideh jokingly forbids her to leave.

The next morning Elly reminds Speideh that she wants to leave. Again the matchmaker dismisses this notion, refusing to take her guest with her when she drives into town for groceries. With the men-folk playing volleyball and the other women variously occupied, it falls to Elly to watch the three kids as they play on the beach. Restless, she helps one of them get her kite in the air, then absentmindedly remarks to herself that she has to go.

A few minutes later, two of the kids tearfully tell the men that the third, Arash, is in the sea. Much drama ensues as the men struggle to find and save the boy, who’s being pulled out to sea by the riptide. Disaster is averted just as the women return from their shopping. 

Everyone then notices that Elly is nowhere to be seen. They assume she must have tried to save Arash, so the men dive back into the sea but can find no trace of her.

To this point, audience members may be of two minds about this movie. You might assume that “About Elly” is Farhadi’s homage to “L’Avventura,” Michelangelo Antonioni’s rumination of men, women and human foibles. Then again, in 2009 this plot wouldn’t be out of place in a made-for-television movie or any other filmic melodrama. During the drowning child crisis, in fact, and some of the subsequent eruptions bet­ween Sepideh and her husband Amir (Mani Haghighi), the writing does appear to plunge into the quagmire of melodrama.

“About Elly” rises to become something utterly more interesting than soap opera. Farhadi intelligently plays with the manipulation of matchmaking, the workaday deceit of good intentions made exponentially worse by tragedy, the violent rage that such strain can leech from otherwise civilized friends and lovers – the very stuff of melodrama, in other words – to make a film that could work equally well among commercial and art house audiences.

Expert cinematography and acting play no small part in this accomplishment. Its greatest strength, however, lies in Farhadi’s writing. Though the first 30 minutes of the film are shot through with low-key deceit, as soon as Elly is removed from the action, the audience and most of the film’s characters become equally separated from the truth of what’s happened – at first, what has happened to Elly, then the real circumstances that saw Sepideh bring her to the Caspian in the first place. 

All this business brings a variety of complexions to the film. The characters try to use bits and pieces of Elly’s behaviour to conjure up different narratives of what became of her – whether she really drowned trying to save the child or simply left them alone because she wanted to return to Tehran – effectively composing their own melodramas, or else offering their dismissive critiques. 

This narrative to-ing and fro-ing becomes so genuinely comic that, by the time the film wends its way to its inconclusive conclusion, audiences can be blind-sided. 

Then you may recall that closed door and the shaft of light glaring through its mail slot, and you may wonder whether you saw what you think you saw.