Cause of Death: Unknown

Cause of Death: Unknown places seven strangers in a van before sunrise, crossing the Lut Desert. When one of them dies, what begins as a logistical problem — a system that refuses to send an ambulance without a doctor’s confirmation that no doctor can provide — becomes something harder to leave: a sustained observation of how ordinary people, already being broken by economic pressure, navigate the slow erosion of their own moral limits. Zarnegar’s characters are neither villains nor exceptions. They come from different lives but the same precarity — and when authority appears on that road, the strangers who cannot agree on anything else find themselves covering for each other without discussion. What the film refuses to simplify is that the decision they finally reach is not a moment of individual failure. It is the outcome of a structure. The pregnant woman waiting at the road’s end does not judge. She is the future. She waits.