"Paying more attention to form than content, Aslani's expertise as a dramaturge is also humbled by his coordination of atmosphere and suspense, summoning a creepily ethnic, swelling percussive score by Sheyda Gharachedaghi, CHESS OF THE WIND's climatic confrontation looks like an out-and-out horror, the paraplegic daughter gruelingly and sinuously crawls about under the dim sepia light, you can barely make out her expressions and features, she morphs into a startled feral creature, operating with the primal instinct for self-preservation, to face the unseen threat with a final showdown. Eventually, the rushed ending leaves a bathetic aftertaste and Aghdashloo's expressiveness is left largely untapped, but CHESS OF THE WIND is such a rara avis in its own terms, indefinable, claustrophobic, conforming to an unrealistic tenet of cause and effect, that you ought to hand it to Aslani and his team for the muscular and idiosyncratic implementation of their own transgressive ideation and craft."
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