In the decades preceding the 1979 revolution and its enormous cultural dislocations, Iran’s cinema had developed into a mature industry; many films during this period featured sophisticated elites with Western fashions, hair, and music, driving American cars and inhabiting large, multi-level, finely decorated homes, the women often wearing tight-fitting, sexy outfits. Samuel Khachikian’s 1962 Delhoreh (US: Anxiety) is no exception. Featuring Iren as Roshanak, a wealthy woman who’s being blackmailed by a man who possesses her extramarital love letters, the film displays her mounting anxiety as she confronts the blackmailer and shoots him dead, which, rather than eliminating the threat, just opens the door to a new world of horrors. The sad part about discovering interesting film noir from underappreciated, international markets is the poor quality of any surviving prints; the almost unwatchable copies available of Anxiety merely hint at the glorious cinematography and stylistic excesses that occasionally enter horror genre territory. In between intensely shot scenes of fistfights, murders, and corpse discoveries, Khachikian’s camera finds inventive angles (through windows, from beneath a glass writing table), pans to quotidian objects (a dripping faucet, a champagne bottle) and, most dramatically, dismembers the female body (a view of legs through a fireplace, a closeup of an hourglass-shaped torso, etc.)