Under the Shadow

A sit­u­a­tion is con­trived where­by a moth­er is strand­ed in her own apart­ment dur­ing the bomb­ing of Tehran in 1988. Noth­ing what­so­ev­er can con­vince her that she needs to get the hell out of there, and fast. The roof caves in. The neigh­bours all flee. She has no fam­i­ly ties. She’s forced on dai­ly trips down to the base­ment air-raid shel­ter. Her hus­band, an army medic, is post­ed to the front line, and she is left alone with her pre-teen daugh­ter, Dor­sa (Avin Man­sha­di). Why she choses to stay remains a mystery.

Though osten­si­bly a hor­ror movie, Babak Anvari’s Under the Shad­ow is also a blunt­ly effec­tive screed on every­day female sup­pres­sion. It’s set in a spe­cif­ic place and dur­ing a spe­cif­ic time, but its fem­i­nist mes­sage is uni­ver­sal. The open­ing scene sees Narges Rashidi’s Shideh dis­cov­er­ing that she’s been denied a place to learn med­i­cine because she was involved in a anti-gov­ern­ment protest dur­ing the Iran­ian rev­o­lu­tion. She chalks up her dis­sent to juve­nile impuls­es dur­ing a time when she didn’t know any bet­ter. Yet, her dreams of tran­scend­ing her lot as a house­wife and moth­er are dashed with a sin­gle swoop of a Biro (wield­ed by an old­er man). Maybe it’s her life of domes­tic enslave­ment that has led her to remain as the walls tum­ble in around her.

Anoth­er rea­son why she is unable to just cut loose is that Dor­sa has lost her favourite doll, the one she sleeps with and clutch­es to her chest every wak­ing hour. The doll is a sym­bol­ic pro­tec­tor, help­ing to pre­vent night­mares of lone­li­ness or sud­den death in the night. Amid all the may­hem, Shideh just needs to find the damn doll and then all will be well. Where could it have gone? Maybe the weird, rich fam­i­ly down­stairs nabbed it while every­one was shuf­fling down to the bunker? Or per­haps it’s some­thing else, some­thing super­nat­ur­al that’s forc­ing its way in through the gigan­tic crack in the ceiling?

There’s a lot to admire in Under the Shad­ow. There’s the incli­na­tion to pick out Rashidi’s grace-under-fire cen­tral turn which brings with it healthy side-por­tions of tough­ness and humour. But then Man­sha­di, as the daugh­ter who could so eas­i­ly have become a yap­ping cypher, is also superb, bring­ing a well-mea­sured blend of pre­coc­i­ty and vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty to her char­ac­ter. Anvari, too, demon­strates a more-than-stur­dy direc­to­r­i­al hand, mak­ing the best of lim­it­ed resources and real­ly pro­ject­ing a sense of the oppres­sive con­fines of the increas­ing­ly dilap­i­dat­ed apart­ment block.

Yet there’s some­thing nag­ging­ly for­mu­la­ic about how the film plays out. It’s that old ques­tion that comes up in ​‘found footage’ movies: why is some­one film­ing this? In this case, why doesn’t Shideh’s basic sur­vival instinct kick? Why won’t she accept her adult respon­si­bil­i­ty to remove her fam­i­ly from the path of mor­tal dan­ger? It feels too much like the mate­r­i­al has been awk­ward­ly mould­ed around a the­sis, and the sub­text is pre­sent­ed with bells, whis­tles and bunting.

For every inter­est­ing point about women being sec­ond class cit­i­zens in Iran­ian soci­ety, it’s under­mined by the basic log­ic of the plot. It also feels as if Anvari is say­ing that women’s unwill­ing­ness to take direct action is why they remain repressed. Still, it’s a might­i­ly impres­sive debut fea­ture, and Anvari will like­ly be signed on to a Mar­vel movie by the time you read these words.