Ten presents ten vignettes of varying lengths separated by fake leaders counting down from ten to one. Almost all the footage is taken from two stationary video cameras mounted on the dashboard of a car and trained on its front seats. The film's protagonist – played by Mania Akbari, a divorced artist with a young son called Amin – is a divorced artist with a young son called Amin. She features in each of the ten scenes, having intense conversations with Amin, her sister, a sex worker, a heartbroken woman, and two women on their way to mosque. She is Kiarostami's first post-Revolutionary female protagonist and – among many other things – perhaps a reply to the Iranian critics who had been attacking him for consigning women to marginal positions in his films. With its starkness and severity, Ten employs a visual style startlingly different from the lyrical, contemplative, rural aesthetic for which the director was known (though of course, in certain ways it is also highly characteristic, especially for its violation of shot reverse shot conventions – that Kiarostami signature is taken to its next level here – and interest in what happens inside cars). The film's formal elements produce a minimalist rigour that forces us to consider the artifice of video while simultaneously creating a sense of realism: on the one hand, the set-up feels harsh and unnatural, at least when compared with the ease with which we are absorbed in films that employ continuity editing; on the other hand, Kiarostami's directorial presence is minimised throughout the movie, inviting us to indulge the impression that we are viewing reality unmediated. Breaking the film into ten separate sections grants it an analytical aspect, such that we are able to study its parts in isolation, and reflect more acutely on the relations between them. The stationary cameras train our gaze very steadily on the characters, giving the film a discomfiting intimacy. The car itself provides a device for constraining and thereby clarifying the potentials for action and expression of the characters on screen as it opens the political, feminist question of the relation between public and private.

It is fair to say that there is something excruciating about this film: the viewer can feel trapped or pinned in place, anxious for a release from the severity of its framing and spare mise-en-scène.