Instead of attaining actual, physical escape, the characters turn to language to transcend their plights and their selves.
That's no easy call for an actress - especially as physical escape is only the beginning of the kind of isolation the trauma-racked pair are plunged into when grappling to regain normality.
However, the kind of escape I am interested in – and the kind I have explored in my book The Tunnels: Escapes Under the Berlin Wall – is a physical escape.
His attitude drives the young Eben to an unhealthy obsession with his dead mother, idealising her as a symbol of softness and stoicism, while his older stepbrothers dream of physical escape in search of gold.
But that physical escape – variously attempted in his chair, on crutches or in his specially adapted Mini – must also vie with a determination to attain spiritual release, via a Hindu-inspired form of self-effacement at perilous odds with John's wonderfully depicted narcissism.
For young Iranians, the Alborz trails are a physical escape from the city where jobs are elusive, but also a mental one — from self-censorship, from monochrome dress, and from the morality police ever alert for a female neck revealed, hands fleetingly held, or hair cascading from a headscarf.
