Esmail is always out and about in the city, in bars and restaurant – on the lookout. He needs to find a woman who will fall in love with him, and vouch for him with the authorities, so he can remain in the country. His increasing desperation is written all over him. And the whole undertaking doesn’t get any easier when he actually develops feelings for a woman, forcing Esmail to make a painful decision. With his feature debut, Swedish-Iranian director Milad Alami has made an intense psychological drama that renders his unhappy hero’s purely instrumental attempts at seduction in luminous, cool images. Yet the audience soon feels very close to Esmail. “The Charmer”, which won the film critics Fedeora prize at the San Sebastian festival, is a film about migration, but mostly a film about loneliness.