This movie strikes me as belonging to that regrettably burgeoning category of "movies that are made for the sake of making a movie". Obviously I can't comment on the motivations of the director but it bears all the hallmarks of a movie that was made up as it went along. In my simplistic mind a good movie can achieve 2 results – it either entertains you or it presents some hypothesis of the directors for consideration. The later category can be implemented in two ways – it can ram the message down the audience's throat so that the message is abundantly clear, or it presents a few clues from which the either the astute viewer can work out the puzzle or the less astute viewer can get confused or bored and turn it off. As a provider of entertainment this movie fails – while provides an interesting glimpse into the lives of a group of affluent Terhanians there is no plot per se. As a provider of a message it also fails. The other reviews on this site document at length theories about "lies" and the effects they can have. This seems to me to be no more than trying to pin depth and meaning to a movie which is simply not there. Sure, one of the characters (Sepideh) seems to be a hair's breadth away from being a pathological liar, and from time to time other characters also lie in quite bizarre ways for reasons that are difficult to fathom – for example why would you tell someone their fiancée was injured in a car crash rather than drowned? But these lies do nothing to effect the outcome of the movie other than to drag it out and provide some sort of confusion that presumably is supposed to manifest itself as tension in the audience. None of the lies resulted in Elly's death or had any material effect on the outcome, such that that was. This is not a bad film, but it is a lazy one, the director not bothering to provide a real story and trying to pretend there is something deep and meaningful hiding behind some manufactured pretext. It is a shell trying to pretend it has substance, a "Waiting for Godot" where nothing worthwhile, honest or profound is revealed during the wait. As others have commented the acting was excellent, especially since it has the feel of a movie that was substantially improvised.
Review of About Elly
