Rarely do Middle Eastern cinema historiographies engage with the question of audiences’ affective relationship with films. Considering the emotional attachment of fans to certain cult films through the passage of time, this paper explores the intertextual elements, the historical context of production, and the thirty-year reception trajectory of D?r?y?sh Mihrj??’s H?m?n (1989) in Iran. Applying cult film theories and analyzing the fan-produced texts, I argue that H?m?n’s realistic outlook on the failed and confused norms of Iranian masculinity has contributed to its persistent relevance to post-revolutionary middle-class intelligentsia. Inspired by a variety of Eastern and Western sources, including Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling (1843), Sadiq Hid?yat’s B?f-i k?r (The Blind Owl, 1936), and Saul Bellow’s Herzog (1964), H?m?n is about a middle-aged man on the verge of losing his wife, properties, and faith. Despite its success in the national competition of Fajr Film Festival, H?m?n neither found a place on the domestic top-ten box-office list nor became an internationally appreciated phenomenon. Its tone was too gloomy for a people in need of normalcy restoration by the end of the war with Iraq and the shifts in the leadership and presidency. Furthermore, the global glorification of Abbas Kiarostami’s cinematic masterpiece, Close-Up, overshadowed all the other aspects of Iranian cinema in that year. The critical reception and fans’ responses to H?m?n, though, soon positioned it beyond its merely filmic boundaries. On a national level, H?m?n became a metaphor for Iranian intellectuals’ disillusionment with the revolution, echoing historically recurrent frustrations. On a broader, regional level, it was deemed a symbolic representation of the Middle Eastern man’s struggles amidst the forces of traditional values and modernity. And yet, on a more globally-inclusive level, it has been celebrated by its fans as a trope for taking pleasure in existentialist sadness, mystic love, and transcendental experience of failure. H?m?n’s exceptional cult status has generated myriad references and homages in Iranian popular culture. A documentary made by M?n? ?aq?q? in 2007 and a drama staged by Muhammad Ra?m?n?y?n in 2015, both titled H?m?nb?z-h? (H?m?ners), along with several other H?m?n-inspired films, short stories, novels, poems, and songs, provide revealing insights into the fans’ perception and practices of an ultimately Middle Eastern cult film. Investigating the subcultural sensibilities and historical dynamism of these lived experiences advances the scholarship on Iranian cinema beyond the current models of aesthetic evaluation and academically fashionable content analyses.