I started watching the Blu-ray version of The Stoning of Soraya M. flying blind. I knew very little of the plot, including that it was based on the true story of a stoning as recounted to a journalist. I was also naive to the fact that much of it was in Farsi! So, after a short period of adjustment, I settled in and found myself enthralled (and repulsed) by the dramatization of the book of the same name. A world away, the social codes may be different, but the dangers are still the same.

When Freidoune Sahebjam, a French journalist, finds himself stranded in an Iranian village, Kupayeh,waiting for his car to be repaired, he hears the story of Soraya, who was brutally stoned the day before. Her aunt recounts to him how Soraya's husband works to rile up the community against her when he wishes to marry a younger woman (a fourteen-year-old?) and doesn't want to pay her the settlement demanded by Islamic law. He trumps up witnesses, browbeats and blackmails the local authorities, and threatens to hurt the families of others to falsify witnesses. Her husband shows bullying, as well as a list of "isms" that catch Soraya in their net and drive her down below the surface.

But what happens is that the verbal abuse escalates to physical abuse, and while Soraya stays true to a man who doesn't deserve her, others become caught up in his lies and she is sentenced to death. It's sick and scary, and has the feel of a movie about Nazis and their propaganda. One man's lies become another man's truth, when the first person is "hard" enough, and his words are taken at their face value. But the escalating continues (it didn't start with gas chambers initially) and soon, Soraya is facing not just a fine or a whipping, which would be bad enough, but the stoning in question. The crowd is whipped into a frenzy, and the cost is absolute, much as it was in The Passion of the Christ, which Caviezel and others involved in Soraya produced.

The crowd's frenzy is frightening, and the way that the young men especially are taught to hate, judge, and abuse is telling. Like the 1971 experiment about prisoners and guards, it doesn't take long for the villagers to all become "right" and for Soraya to be wrong, even while the truth isn't at all in the mix. Some kill for personal gain; some kill for pleasure; some kill because everyone else is doing it; some kill because they're afraid that others will think less of them if they don't. It's the essence of sin: that we would do something we know is wrong that separates us from God.

And that's where the essence of the movie is at its most disturbing. Soraya is stoned because religious law says it is so. Regardless of what developments and process have gone into the 99% of the Muslim world where this doesn't apply, this group, this village, finds it to be acceptable and justified that Soraya be stoned to death. Because it pleases "god." Disregarding that it is trumped up on false charges, that it is merely for money that a human life will be extinguished, the villagers and their religious leaders seem to actually take pleasure in the death of Soraya. Religious law is twisted, and killing a human being becomes an outlet for their frustration, anger, and sexist understandings of human relations.

It's a brilliant movie, and one that will haunt you long after it's over. But I don't know that you'll ever look at religious law, or the "witnessing" of someone against another, the same way ever again. You'll be struck by the impact of each stone, and by the way that even when a "sign" is given from the heavens that this is unjust, that the community is too sure of itself to stop. And maybe, just maybe, the next time you see the wrong thing happening, you'll have the strength to be the one who stands up and says "no," and stops it.

No one stopped the system from crushing Soraya, but maybe her story can make a difference.