Under the Shadow (2016) Review!!!

Synopsis – As a mother and daughter struggle to cope with the terrors of the post-revolution, war-torn Tehran of the 1980s, a mysterious evil begins to haunt their home.

My Take – With so many horror films trading ideas for scares, its refreshing to find a film that has an abundance of both. Due to their lack of production techniques or budgets (I am not sure), horror films coming out of the Middle East, have been repulsive at best. But right from its 1^st trailer to its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, something about this Farsi language film seemed intriguing, mainly due to its leaner introduction to the supernatural entities known as Djinns. This supernatural forces or demonic presences from Islamic mythology are malevolent spirits that whip around your apartment amid gusts of wind, moving things around, terrorizing people and stealing children. While two films in recent times, Jinn (2014) and Djinn (2013), exploring the same had some ghastly results (despite the later being directed by Tobe Hopper, the man behind The Texas Chainsaw Massacre films and Poltergeist) this Babak Ansari directed film will have you looking askew at sheets of fabric. Director Babak Ansari is clearly somebody who has an obvious cine literate understanding and love for the horror genre, and manages to craft a film that earns its frights through a type of storytelling that is so regularly absent from the studio Horror films that it deserves your absolute attention. In my opinion, horror films generally work best when there is a sense of mystery to proceedings, the unknown being one of the scariest things there is. This was the reason that the J-Horror films from Japan were so terrifying to western audiences, as the Japanese conception of the supernatural was so different to ours meaning that things happened in those films that were highly unpredictable and unsettling. It’s this same reason that this horror film from an Iranian cultural perspective feels more original in approach. And so it proves, as while there are familiar elements in this ghost story, such as placing a mother and child into the same psycho-supernatural danger as films like Rosemary’s Baby, Poltergeist or more recently The Babadook there are also aspects that are less predictable, resulting in a fascinating film.

The story follows Shideh (Narges Rashidi), an aspiring doctor in Tehran during the height of the 80s Iran-Iraq war. Still reeling from the loss of her mother when past political activism catches up with her and she’s barred from medical school. With her dreams freshly dashed, life in the small, two-bedroom apartment she shares with her young daughter Dorsa (Avin Manshadi) and husband Dr. Iraj (Bobby Naderi) seems very less. When Iraj gets called away to the front line. Shideh is left to care for Dorsa on her own and as more and more Iraqi missiles rain down, everything – including recognizable reality – begins to unravel. When an Iraqi missile comes crashing through the roof of their building and doesn’t detonate, the tenants of the building believe that a Djinn may be at their door. At first, the stubborn, strong-minded Shideh doesn’t believe a word about it. Stories of demonic spirits who come riding in on the wind to terrorize the living are exactly that – stories. Or are they? As the situation takes its toll the questions start stacking up. Why can’t Dorsa find her favorite doll? Why did Shideh find her 80s-tastic exercise tape shredded up and thrown in the trash? When the missile hit did her elderly neighbor die of a sudden heart attack, or was it something else? Something more sinister? Let’s start by what this film is not: it’s not gory or fast paced. If you’re looking for a Halloween pop corn film to watch with friends, this is not that. If you’re expecting supporting characters to drop dead every fifteen minutes, this is not that. Judging the film on those basis is ridiculous and unfair, it is not trying to be Conjuring III. The most obvious comparison to make of Anvari’s work – a comparison everybody is making – is to Jennifer Kent’s 2014 hit, The Babadook, with both films featuring a central relationship between a mother and her child. The comparisons between the two films run much deeper than a story that revolves around a mother and a child, however, as each shares an ambiguity surrounding the mental health of their female characters. Another commonality is that even this film doesn’t rely on cheap jump scares. The way the film is paced, it actually lets the tension and intensity accumulate, little by little, and the scares that it delivers, although few in number, are guaranteed to leave a mark. A reason that made this one really stand out for me was the historical setting and social context that came with that. While on the one hand this is a claustrophobic apartment-based horror film, there are also very real terrors outside the home too.

In fact, the apartment is a haven for the mother in many ways, a place where she does not have to wear restrictive clothing and can work-out to her Jane Fonda video. Beyond this safe sanctuary she has to deal with a repressive regime who may violently punish her if her clothing is not correct or if they even hear she owns a VCR. The restrictive lives of women during the Cultural Revolution is the real life horror that the protagonist experiences out with the home, while the supernatural Djinn entity is the horror she and her daughter endure within the home. At the same time there are the horrors of war constantly occurring without warning and with potential deadly consequences. The film’s tension comes not just from Shideh’s steely response to the escalating amount of unexplainable happenings in the flat, but also from her strained relationship with her daughter and her husband and the creeping sense of isolation as her friends and neighbors flee the city for safety. Support is nowhere to be found: at one point, having escaped her apartment following another incident, she’s briefly incarcerated for being in public without a hijab. Though ostensibly a horror film, Babak Anvari’s film 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 sympathetic manner in which Anvari balances empathy and paranoia to articulate Shideh’s suffocation owes much to the measured approach to narrative, but don’t be fooled, it soon becomes apparent Anvari is playing with audience expectations and quietly laying the foundations for a truly terrifying second act. For a debut film Babak Anvari, 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. Films like It Follows, Green Room and Don’t Breathe have all triumphed on tiny budgets. And now, I reckon this film can join their ranks and then some. Lastly, and certainly not least there are a couple of excellent performances in here underpinning everything. Narges Rashidi is extremely compelling as the mother and there’s the inclination to pick out Rashidi’s grace-under-fire central turn which brings with it healthy side-portions of toughness and humor. But then Avin Manshadi puts in a very strong performance as her young daughter. 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. We really do care about these two sympathetic and realistic characters. Bobby Naderi plays his part well. The Djinn, the so-called “monster” in this film, is nothing short of amazing given the story and the context, and he’s not something you’re likely to forget any time soon. On the whole, ‘Under the Shadow’ is a genuinely terrifying film that also serves as an accurate and sympathetic encapsulation of life during war.