Tina Kakadelis
Humans’ desire to look beautiful is not unique to modern times. There’s a healthy way to pursue this feeling, but technological innovations have allowed people to take these desires to new extremes. Nose jobs, breast implants, butt lifts, eyebrow lifts, cheek shaving, tummy tucks – the list goes on and on. The body becomes a canvas in the pursuit of perfection. Somewhat paradoxically, Tehran has become the epicenter for surgeries like these, despite the restrictive cultural atmosphere. Documentarian Afsaneh Salari’s latest film, Tehran, Under the Skin, will have its world premiere at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival.
The first words spoken in Tehran, Under the Skin are from a doctor coaxing a patient out of anesthesia. They say, “Your breasts are so pretty now. Open your eyes.” It’s jarring for the viewer to be introduced in this way, but that’s the preferred outcome all the subjects in the film are striving for. Tehran, Under the Skin is a vérité approach that embeds itself in the offices of two Iranian plastic surgeons. They conduct their businesses quite differently. One gathers all patients in a room and grades their noses for surgery potential, while the other meets them in a private office. Both, though, are extremely busy, gaining most of their clients through social media.
Tehran, Under the Skin will make the viewer’s jaw drop. Not all at once, but slowly over the course of the documentary’s runtime, as disbelief takes hold. There are extreme close-ups of procedures, including a much more intimate look at a butt implant than many of us would ever like to experience. It’s not just the intricacies of these surgeries that are hard to swallow, but the attitudes toward plastic surgery. Both women and men seek out a variety of procedures, and no two reasons for being there are the same. Some say they don’t even see anything wrong with the body part that’s being operated on, but they don’t want to be left behind because everyone around them is going under the knife. Others dislike a feature and believe the change will give them self-love. Either way, hundreds of people are arriving at these offices daily for some sort of consultation.
Salari approaches the people featured in Tehran, Under the Skin with a sense of curiosity. It’s only at the end of the documentary that one of the people in front of the camera turns the question back to Salari. What is the director’s opinion of what she’s describing as an epidemic? Salari admits that she didn’t think too much about it before starting work on the project, but she now sees it as a bandage on the greater wounds of the world, of which there are so many. “Iranian society is bipolar,” she says. Women are in hijabs, afraid to have their image seen on camera, but are also chasing bodily perfection. It’s a contradiction that isn’t resolved in the film’s runtime, nor could it be. These cracks and fissures go deep into Iranian history, and a few well-placed cuts and injections are only prolonging the inevitable clash.
Ironically, one of the doctors has a piece of art on the wall that reads “Perfect is the enemy of good.” Tehran, Under the Skin burrows itself into the mindsets of people who are thinking about body image every second of their existence. It’s often a dark place to be because the doctors will tell a prospective patient their nose is too good to be operated on. Where does that leave that woman? Forced to return home to family and friends who have told her she needs fixing, only to come back the same. It’s baffling to watch these doctors, whose social media presence is all about encouraging people to change themselves, turn potential patients away at the door. They’ve built a career on making people question their self-worth and see themselves as arbiters of perfection. At the end of the film, Salari’s diagnosis feels most apt. This abundance of surgery is a tourniquet on a problem not unique to Iran, and Tehran, Under the Skin makes the case for interrogating this growing anxiety worldwide.
