Zir-e Sayeh
Babak Anvari (2016)
The writer-director Babak Anvari makes clever use of the place and the time – Tehran, during the 1980s Iran-Iraq War – to give an original twist to familiar horror elements. Shideh (Narges Rashidi) is refused permission to resume the medical studies she suspended a few years ago, when she married and had a child: the reason given by the authorities is her former involvement in left-wing student politics. Her husband Iraj (Bobby Naderi) is a doctor working for the Iranian military. When he receives a new assignment, to an area where frontline fighting is taking place, Iraj wants Shideh and the couple’s young daughter Dorsa (Avin Manshadi) to leave Tehran and go to stay with his family. The capital is under increasing attack, as part of Saddam Hussein’s ‘War of the Cities’ – a series of air raids, missile attacks and artillery shellings of Iran’s major urban areas. Shideh insists on staying put. From the very start of the film, she’s thwarted, impatient, full of suppressed energy. She’s angry at being prevented from completing her studies and thereby from increasing her sense of independence – her husband’s unsympathetic reaction makes things worse. She reminds Dorsa, as the little girl plays with her doll, that toys aren’t allowed at the breakfast table. Once breakfast is over, Shideh lets off steam by exercising to one of her cache of banned Jane Fonda workout videos.
Like many a no-nonsense rationalist before her, Shideh is forced to learn that there are more things in heaven and earth, etc – but she does so within a framework that combines supernatural horror story and political parable. The events in Under the Shadow repeatedly evoke horror tropes that reverberate in a new way, thanks to the particular, actual context of the narrative. It’s conventional for the house at the centre of a horror story to be threatened by something nasty trying to penetrate it. In this case, a war is going on outside: one of the somethings that penetrates the apartment building is a missile, which comes through the roof but doesn’t explode. When the lights suddenly go out in the building, it’s usually because of a power cut. While there may be no rational explanation for other goings-on, there’s a popular irrational explanation for them. The belief that a djinn has got into their world is shared by Dorsa, Mrs Ebrahimi (Aram Ghasemy), whose husband (Ray Haratian) owns the building, and other residents. The grown-ups believe the djinn has possessed the child. Dorsa’s doll becomes an important presence – and absence – in the film. It goes missing and Dorsa accuses her mother of having stolen it. The doll later turns up in a drawer, alongside the medical dictionary that the teenage Shideh received as a gift from her mother. It was the latter, as her inscription on the dictionary’s title page makes clear, who wanted her daughter to become a doctor: Iraj suggests that it was her mother’s recent death that made Shideh want to return to her studies.
As often happens in the horror genre, the central location gradually empties of people until only the protagonists are left to fight on. The apartment building becomes a less secure environment the moment that Iraj leaves it. Babak Anvari achieves that effect by the ominous sight and sound of the gates to the building locking behind Iraj; this is repeated after one or two subsequent departures from the place. Shideh finds herself on the receiving end of a collection of oppressive forces. Although apparently disparate, these combine not only to frustrate her ambitions to be a modern woman but also to make her feel she’s a bad mother to Dorsa – at first intolerant of her daughter, then unable to comfort and protect her. In time, Shideh thinks she sees the djinn – and the audience of Under the Shadow sees what she sees. It’s a violently sinuous sheet of patterned fabric: what else it may be – a nightmarish vision, a symbol of what Shideh is up against in 1980s Iran – Anvari leaves ambiguous.
One night, Shideh, with Dorsa in her arms, rushes from the building and into the dark street in terror. To her huge relief, she sees the lights of a police vehicle ahead. When she reaches it, the police officers aren’t at all comforting: they take Shideh into custody for failing to wear a chador in public (she is released with a ticking off). Anvari’s intelligent approach comes at some cost to spine-chilling. There are some frights and jolts – the djinn-in-sheet’s-clothing, Shideh’s desperate use of gaffer tape to keep out what’s trying to get in through cracks in the windows and ceiling, even the shock of toast springing from a toaster in sudden close-up – but continuing awareness of the political and cultural dimensions of the story, and how artfully these are worked into it, distance one from the scary effects. The viewer, unlike Shideh, is never helplessly submerged in the horror of Under the Shadow yet this is still an accomplished and effective piece of cinema.
20 October 2016
