Black Rabbit, White Rabbit

Black Rabbit, White Rabbit opens with an Anton Chekhov quote about narrative setup and payoff — if a gun appears in a story, it must go off — establishing the meta-fictional framework that governs everything that follows. The inciting event is a man's death during an illegal gun deal at an antique shop, which sets three interlocking storylines in motion at a ramshackle film studio in Tajikistan. In the first strand, Sara (Hasti Mohammai), an upper-class woman swathed in bandages after a severe car crash, convalesces at home. She begins to suspect that the accident was not random but deliberately engineered as part of a larger conspiracy. She also develops an uncanny sensitivity — the ability to sense or 'communicate' with household objects — and is visited by a delivery person who demands she accept a package paid for in advance by the dead man from the antique shop. In the second strand, Babak (Babak Karimi), a prop master and weapons handler, is working on a shot-for-shot remake of the classic Iranian television epic 'Hezar Dastan' (a nationalistic birth-of-a-nation story) being produced at the same Tajiki studio. Babak has lost his ID and cannot properly verify whether the firearm needed for the film's climactic assassination scene is a real gun or a prop — an anxiety explicitly shadowed by the Alec Baldwin on-set shooting incident. He moves urgently through the studio complex trying to locate the film's director and resolve the question before the scene is shot. In the third strand, an ambitious young woman (Kibriyo Dilyobova) arrives uninvited at the production location and insists on auditioning for a role. Her audition consists of old-fashioned stage-magician tricks, including pulling live rabbits from a top hat. The narrative is structured as a prologue, four chapters, and an epilogue, and Mokri employs extended single takes, then revisits the same scenes from shifted perspectives — a time-loop relay that passes the point of view from character to character, progressively blurring the boundary between what is happening inside the film-within-the-film and what is 'real.' Supernatural touches accumulate: a luminous force field appears around Sara, props begin speaking to one another in subtitled dialogue, and rabbits multiply throughout the studio in ways that drift toward the uncanny. The central gun circulates as a MacGuffin connecting all three storylines, with each character's fate hinging on whether it is loaded with real or blank ammunition. Specific details of the climax and resolution are not fully disclosed in available critical sources; reviews describe the ending as tonally ambiguous and structurally recursive rather than conventionally resolved.

Sources: Wikipedia, Variety review, Screen Daily review, DreamLab Films, IMDb search result