Under the Shadow

Tehran, sometime in the mid-to-late 1980s: the Iran-Iraq War is in full effect, with Saddam Hussein’s air forces bombing Tehran mercilessly in an effort to shatter morale. The details of the war are hardly exposited, which is fair: for the citizens caught in the middle, there was no logic or historical context, only two countries with longstanding animosity trying to weaken the other and reclaim land. 

For one woman in particular—Shideh (Narges Rashidi), whose mother has recently died and who has just been told by a university bureaucrat that a woman like her has no chance of completing her medical studies—the war is simply a literal manifestation of her trapped and powerless state. Her husband Iraj (Bobby Naderi) isn’t a chauvinist villain, but he also can’t sympathize with Shideh’s inability to pursue her career or the expectation that she simply carry out her duties as a wife and mother. In any case, Iraj is soon conscripted into his yearly mandatory military service, so he’s sent to a remote area near the Iraqi border—“the middle of the fighting,” Shideh worriedly says.
 
Shideh cares for their daughter Dorsa (Avin Manshadi), but we get the sense that she always demands more from herself, feeling that she’s somehow lacking as a mother (perhaps because she wasn’t ready or eager to be a mother in the first place). This anxiety about parenthood is contextualized against her political activism when she was in college, during the chaotic years of the Iranian Revolution—a time in which, as Shideh says, “everyone was political,” though her commitment to dissidence waned after she became pregnant.  Iraj, meanwhile, decided to forego politics and focus on his studies, a source of continued bitterness between the two.
 
All of this backstory is clearly and powerfully conveyed to the audience before any reference to “djinn”—ghostly apparitions that torment the living. In the case of Under the Shadow, these djinn may arrive alongside an Iraqi missile that slams into Shideh’s apartment building (but fails to explode); or they may accompany the arrival of an eerie young boy whose parents died in the war, and whose slaughter he witnessed firsthand. In any case it’s obvious that the ghosts created by seemingly neverending war are both literal and figurative in this case, and it’s a testament to the movie’s intense sympathy for its characters that the audience is unnerved before anything explicitly horrific happens.
 
Like George Romero’s Living Dead series or Pulse (2001), for example, Under the Shadow is one of those horror movies that potently realizes the truest terrors are the ones we recognize from real life: the political horrors of senseless war and brutality, the social horrors of people who oppress and subjugate others only to preserve their own power. It also cleverly realizes that many audiences have become immune to such imagery, having seen footage of warfare and bigotry constantly in the news media, and so it amplifies the effect of such violence through the use of fantastical genres. An image of a missile striking a building in the Middle East may seem tragically commonplace to viewers who have watched such footage ad nauseam on CNN; an image of a ghost appearing from nowhere, then absconding from a room by leaping up to the ceiling and slipping through a gaping hole left by a missile’s impact, is much harder to dismiss, and even encourages the viewer to reflect on their own inability to consider the human and ethical weight of straightforward scenes of warfare. (Such is the power of genres such as horror and science-fiction when they incorporate a sociopolitical critique.)

Iranian-born writer-director Babak Anvari (making his feature debut) is highly critical of his home country. Though few details are provided to give context about the Iran-Iraq War, even those casually familiar with this history might know that the carnage dragged on for eight years mostly due to sectarian differences between Muslim communities in Iran and Iraq, as well as the refusal of Ayatollah Khomeini (having recently risen to power) to grant any concessions or leniency to Saddam Hussein.
 
Perhaps surprisingly, the plight of Shideh as a woman in Tehran in the immediate aftermath of the Iranian Revolution is a much more pronounced source of anxiety in the film, making it a textbook feminist horror film. Shideh is offered no social opportunities and very few freedoms; she covertly watches Jane Fonda workout videos on a VCR that the family has to keep hidden from neighbors, since they are not supposed to have any kind of contact with Western media. There’s a heartbreaking scene in which Shideh flees from her apartment with her daughter after narrowly escaping a djinn, then is immediately arrested by the police for going out onto the streets at night, a single woman, without a hijab. Several hallucinations and ghostly encounters call out Shideh’s self-perceived inferiority as a mother, and an evil spirit late in the film takes the appearance of a full-body chador, its waving fabric coming to resemble an inescapable web of oppression. Anvari shows aching sympathy towards his countrywomen, forced to deal with the everyday trauma of life during wartime while simultaneously dismissed and disrespected by the Islamic regime that had recently wrested control of the country. It’s no surprise that the film was funded by foreign companies (from Jordan, Qatar, and England) and filmed in Jordan; this is a frank depiction of life for Iranian women that is seldom seen in Iranian movies, which still have to gain approval from a state censorship board.
 
Not everything is so admirable and well-thought-out in Under the Shadow; while I love films that use genre elements to emphasize social commentary and flesh out characters, some of the more familiar horror tropes come off as rushed and predictable here. There are a few too many jump scares and creepy images that seem to have little to do with the rest of the movie’s themes and motifs (one potentially chilling scene leads to an encounter with a ghost that is shaped like a massive set of teeth, which makes no sense at all). But demanding perfection from a film that juggles so many things so well seems churlish and ungrateful.
 
Under the Shadow ends with a trio of static shots—all medium shots, presented in an unobtrusive style—that suggest all is not well, that nothing is resolved, the terror will continue even after this momentary relief. It rings true both narratively and thematically: the djinn will haunt these characters long after the movie is over, and institutionalized sexism and ingrained prejudice will continue to plague a proud country that has been invaded and exploited for much of its recent history. The film does feel like a rare achievement, a horror story as chilling as it is committed to a harsh reality. The scares in Under the Shadow don’t come with the comfortable realization that they’re confined to a world of fiction.  

Under the Shadow

Grade: B

Runtime: 84m.
Countries: UK/Jordan/Qatar/Iran
Premiere: January 22, 2016 (Sundance Film Festival)
US Release: October 7, 2016

Director: Babak Anvari
Producers: Emily Leo, Oliver Roskill, Lucan Toh, Tim Werenko
Writer: Babak Anvari
Music: Gavin Cullen, Will McGillivray
Cinematography: Kit Fraser
Editor: Christopher Barwell
​Cast: Narges Rashidi, Avin Manshadi, Bobby Naderi, Arash Marandi, Aram Ghasemy, Soussan Farrokhnia, Ray Haratian, Hamid Djavadan, Behi Djanati Atai, Bijan Daneshmand, Nabil Koni