Tehran, Under the Skin (2026) Movie Drinking Game
Take a Drink: when a surgeon discourages having a procedure
Take a Drink: when a male gets/had a procedure
Take a Drink: when someone declines to be on camera
Take a Drink: for nose job bandages
Do a Shot: for terrifyingly specific societal pushback
By: Henry J. Fromage (Two Beers) –
If you want to see regular Iranian life depicted on screen, at best you’re likely going to be limited to the social issues dramas that make it to major festivals. Even documentaries tend to be focused on poorer or more oppressed populations.
Tehran, Under the Skin sheds light on a very specific corner of Iranian society- the elective plastic surgery industry, which is much more popular there than you’re likely to realize.
A Toast
My intro wasn’t meant to imply this isn’t a social issues documentary. It’s just that the Iranian women (and even a few men) interviewed here as they screen for, have, and recover from their beauty-focused procedures have an incredibly complex mix of competing motivations and societal pressures that aren’t all necessarily present in other parts of the world.
They come from a society that clearly values and prioritizes beauty no less than in other parts of the world, despite also being in a country where a young girl will be told, in school, “Don’t you know that if your breasts show under your clothes, they’ll hang you from them in Hell?” Plastic surgery is also surprisingly cheap there- a nose job is cheaper than a new phone (although a new phone may be a bit more expensive than elsewhere for perhaps obvious reasons considering current events- and past ones, the sanctions are hardly new).
We observe a couple different surgeons to see their differing approach, but the female surgeon is incredibly direct- much more so than her male counterpart (whose in-OR social media videos will get him fired most places, fittingly so). There’s a scene where she goes through an entire room of women in minutes, rejecting most of their requests for a nose job for a variety of reasons. She’ll only take cases she’s assured of a great (and dramatic enough to be noticeable), result- she has a reputation to uphold, all the more important in a country where she had to fight particularly hard to attain this position.
Director and Tehran native Afsaneh Salari is very, even surprisingly candid in her societal critique here, using the subject of plastic surgery to examine Iranian society at large. She draws voiceover segments from the writings of others, but they’re unmistakably sharp, and are most effective when examining the body dysmorphia that comes with just being a woman- from becoming one in puberty, to all the shocking effects of pregnancy on the body for a first-time mother, to how aging drives many to this industry to recapture the beauty of youth.
Beer Two
While the passages read in voiceover are extremely evocative, they don’t all necessarily fit into the themes at hand, instead delivering more general critiques on Iranian society that don’t necessarily have anything to do with the film’s subject.
Verdict
Tehran, Under the Skin examines the prevalence of elective plastic surgery in Tehran, and the complex motivations for pursuing it there.
