Kevin Wight’s review published on Letterboxd:
Atiq Rahimi's adaptation of his own novel, The Patience Stone would make a very interesting double-bill with Haifaa al-Mansour's Wadjda, as both deal with different aspects of feminine experience in the contemporary Middle-East.
However, while Wadjda is a playful work that uses the innate willfulness and independence of its 10 year-old protagonist as a means of questioning the patriarchal religious order in the relative stability of Saudi Arabia, The Patience Stone is a far angrier work that examines ideas of femininity and female sexuality in an unnamed country (but probably Afghanistan) that has been ripped apart by the virulent strain of Islam that dominates there.
Golshifteh Farahani is astonishing as the unnamed woman who looks after her paralysed war-hero husband after he has been shot in the neck. Much younger than he, she uses him as a sounding board, the 'Patience Stone' of the title, to rid herself of all her bitterness and resentment towards him. Amid her coruscating invective she confesses her sexual longing and her disappointment at his treatment of her in the bedroom.
What is immediately interesting is how shocking these confessions sound to my Western ears. Even though Bibi Andersson's Alma in Persona could tell us of a youthful foursome in fairly graphic detail back in the 1960s, it is rather bracing to hear it from a Muslim woman even fifty years later. What this does is really challenge perceptions of female Muslim sexuality. Okay, like Bergman, Rahimi is a male writer putting words in his female characters' mouths, but like Bergman there is a sense of real authenticity here.
Unfortunately, where the film falls down a little is in its dramatic stasis. The entire film flits between the woman's revelations to her husband and her nocturnal sojourns to her earthy, sage aunt. That is pretty much it for the duration, so there are periods where the tension dissipates and it wallows in mundanity for a while, which is a real pity as it comes really quite close to being a small masterpiece.