The first feature from writer-director Babak Anvari, the atmospheric Iranian horror film “Under
the Shadow” is set in post-Revolution Tehran of the late 1980’s, where a woman
and her young daughter must contend with dark forces building both inside and
outside their home.
The wife of a doctor, Shideh (Narges Rashidi) finds her own
career aspirations stymied when her political activism during the Revolution
results in her rejection from medical school. So she remains in the home,
spending her time caring for Dorsa (Avin Manshadi) and, whenever the opportunity presents itself,
passing the time by breaking out her illegal Jane Fonda fitness tapes.
Shideh’s stress only increases when
her husband, Iraj (Bobby Naderi),
is called to the front lines of the raging war with Iraq. As bombs continue to
rain down on the city, she and Dorsa grow more and more isolated as one by one
their neighbors leave the area. When a missile crashes through the roof of
their apartment building without detonating, it seems as though they’ve avoided
catastrophe, but its arrival coincides with strange occurrences: Dorsa’s
beloved doll goes missing and she begins to converse with invisible visitors;
then those prized workout tapes somehow end up in the garbage. The landlord’s
wife warns of djinn, malevolent spirits drawn wherever there is “fear and
anxiety,” attaching themselves to a host they soon possess.
Anvari wrings as much tension from
the societal and political upheaval that has taken hold of the country as he
does from supernatural frights: at one point when Shideh
flees her apartment in fear, she’s promptly arrested by morality police for not
having her head properly covered. A ghost story set in an isolated domestic
setting where maternal anxieties take hold, “Under the Shadow” has a bit of
“The Babadook” in it. But the supernatural element
works to even stronger effect here, functioning beyond metaphor to become
something truly scary.
This article appears in Oct 19-25, 2016.
