Under the Shadow, a response to modern society’s predilection for political violence, resorts to the tropes of a horror-film narrative to make its poignant claims about its effects on ordinary people. Because war-making seems intrinsic to the very nature of modernity, writer/director Babak Anvari is forced to turn to a supernatural story in his feature-length debut film. The only escape from violence is to escape nature itself, he avers. He joins a host of other recent filmmakers in treating war in this oblique yet direct way.
Under the Shadow commences with a series of title cards setting the historical stage. It is set in ‘80s Iran, and the cards explain that the Revolution of 1979 has been consolidated and that Iran is at war with Iraq. The war, then, is the most central subject of the film, yet all of the action takes place far from the frontlines in an increasingly besieged Tehran. It is a war movie without war, but the war will still force its way into the narrative over and over again.
The protagonist is Shideh (Narges Rashidi), a woman beleaguered with a panoply of problems. Her leftist political activism in the build up to the Shah’s overthrow in the late ‘70s precludes her from finishing her medical school education, confining her to a life of domesticity with her daughter while her husband works. Her mother recently died, and she has not finished the grieving process for that personal tragedy. Her husband is conscripted and sent to the front lines. Her landlord is a jerk. It is hard to be a woman in mid-‘80s Iran, and then her daughter begins having nightmares about mystical beings. A panoply of problems.
The plot is structured around that latter issue: the nightmares that Shideh’s daughter, Dorsa (Avin Manshadi), begins having. The war plays an integral role in these, as they are triggered when the family’s apartment complex gets directly hit by an unexploded Iraqi missile. Following that terrifying event, Dorsa becomes increasingly more anxious and insists that she is seeing mysterious human-like wraiths throughout their apartment. Shideh, too, starts to have vivid and haunted dreams. Meanwhile, with the increasing threat of missile attack, more and more of the family’s neighbors evacuate Tehran in panic, leaving Shideh and Dorsa ever more isolated.
Anvari’s direction in these scenes is superb, creating several jump scares and unrelentingly building tension. Under the Shadow features stellar editing throughout. Once the plot settles into the horror genre conventions, the cinematography, too, becomes engaging, even featuring a scene where the camera vertically rotates 90 degrees multiple times.
All of this atmosphere and brilliant craft culminates in a spectacular blitzkrieg finale. The ethereal beings brought to the building by the missile—identified as djinn by a devout neighbor—become ever more aggressively interventionist into Shideh’s and Dorsa’s lives, trying to drive them apart and keep them from leaving the city. Eventually, the mother-daughter bond and the pressure to escape Tehran create a beautifully-composed and edited finale that would be cruel to spoil here.
The Iran-Iraq War as subtext is the heart and soul of the film. Anvari has provided a scintillating account of the impact of impending random violent death on the lives of ordinary people. Shideh’s personal misery is a bit overdone in the script and sometimes poorly acted by Rashidi, who fares better in scenes where she is under duress, but the point is to establish that the war is just one of her many issues. In thinking about war and what it does to society, it is easy to posit that war takes over daily life and erases other issues with its own importance. But this is certainly not the case. War can be marginal, even a war as massive and deadly as the Iran-Iraq War of the ‘80s, which was one of the most severe conflicts of the past 70 years. But, Anvari insists, at some point such mass violence is bound to insert itself into the quotidian, to disrupt other personal conflicts and demand action from individuals. Shideh, regardless of what else is going on, must remove herself and her daughter from Tehran. Until she does, they will be possessed by fear. Whether the djinn are allegorical or not, they enter the characters’ lives during the missile attack—they are, then, either literally or metaphorically, the war. And the war, Under the Shadow illustrates, is terrifying.
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