Under the Shadow (2016)
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.
Director:
Babak AnvariWriter:
Babak AnvariStars:
Language:
PersianRelease Date:
30 September 2016 (UK) See more »Also Known As:
Bajo la sombra See more »Filming Locations:
Amman, JordanBox Office
Opening Weekend:
$14.000 (USA) (9 October 2016)Gross:
$30.999 (USA) (23 October 2016)
See more »
Company Credits
Technical Specs
Runtime:
Color:
ColorAspect Ratio:
2.35 : 1Did You Know?
Soundtracks
Djinn
Written and Performed by Gavin Cullen and Will McGillivray for Blacksands.Productions
Written and Performed by Gavin Cullen and Will McGillivray for Blacksands.Productions
Total silence is rare in "Under the Shadow." There is the wind,
sometimes a whisper, sometimes a roar. Radio stations blare shouted
speeches and chanting crowds. Calls to prayer echo. Air-raid sirens
scream. Loudspeakers in the hallways of the college campus blare
anthemic music. Even benign sounds—a toaster, a phone ringing, the music
in a Jane Fonda
workout video—occur at a jarring decibel level. When the background
noise drops out, the silence is deafening. Something terrible is
happening. The chaos in the outside world infiltrates the interior.
"Under the Shadow," a Farsi-language debut feature written and directed
by Babak Anvari,
creates a world where reality itself is suspect. In a year filled with
great first features, add "Under the Shadow" to the list.
Taking place in 1988 Tehran, during the "war of the cities" phase of
the nearly decade long Iran-Iraq war, "Under the Shadow" is the story of
Shideh (Narges Rashidi) and Dorsa (Avin Manshadi),
a mother and daughter holed up in their apartment, withstanding the
missile bombardment. As the attacks increase in frequency, the city
empties of people. Shideh and Dorsa remain, at first because Shideh is
stubborn, and feeling bullied by her absent husband's demands (over
static-crackling phone calls from one of the war fronts where he is
stationed) that she go stay with his parents. Shideh refuses, taping X's
on the windows, hustling Dorsa into the basement during air raids,
pulling out her illegal VCR to do Jane Fonda workouts (after closing the
curtains).
There are signs early on that all is not entirely
well. Shideh has a history of sleepwalking. Dorsa has night terrors.
When Shideh is expelled from her medical school for political activity
during the Revolution, her husband Iraj (Bobby Naderi)
is sympathetic but also says, "Maybe it's for the best." There is
simmering resentment in the marriage, exacerbated by the instituting of
laws requiring chadors worn in the street and a hemming-in of women's
mobility. Those laws have infiltrated personal relationships,
highlighting fissures in the home that may have already been there.
The
atmosphere in the apartment building among the residents is one of
whispered rumors, suspicion of one another, belief in portents of doom.
An orphan child living with the landlord informs Dorsa that the building
is haunted by a djinn. The landlord's wife believes in djinn, telling
Shideh: "They travel on the wind, moving from place to place until they
find someone to possess." Djinn are most active "where there is fear and
anxiety," according to banned Iranian writer Gholam-Hossein Sa’edi,
whose book Shideh reads, looking for answers. Shideh tells Dorsa
repeatedly there is no such thing as a djinn but slowly, over time,
Shideh begins to doubt herself. Things disappear. Dorsa's beloved doll
vanishes. Shideh's beloved Jane Fonda tape ends up in the garbage.
Shideh's medical textbook, locked in a cabinet, somehow ends up in
another apartment. When Shideh finally decides that it's time to go to
Iraj's parents, Dorsa refuses to leave until her doll is found. Dorsa
develops a fever. And then things get really weird.
Babak Anvari moves "Under the Shadow" from realism into horror almost
imperceptibly. It is impossible to know what is real and what is not,
what is a result of Shideh's exhaustion and what is a valid response to
living in a war zone. Cinematographer Kit Fraser,
who also shot Anvari's short films "Solitary" and "Two & Two" (the
latter nominated for a BAFTA) starts with a naturalistic style and then
shifts, the apartment becoming a manifestation of its trapped
inhabitants' psyches. Cracks in the ceiling exaggerate themselves
overnight. The concrete steps to the basement stretch down into darkness
like a disorienting Escher woodcut. The tarp held down over the hole in
the roof from the intrusion of an unexploded missile snaps in the wind
like a sentient being.
While "Under the Shadow" has much in common with "The Babadook,"
especially in its portrayal of shared sleep-deprivation in mother and
child as well as an interior that morphs into a nightmarescape before
our eyes, it is also reminiscent of Roman Polanski's "Repulsion," where
grasping arms emerge from hallway walls suddenly, soft like clay, and
gigantic cracks shiver across walls and ceiling. The building in "Under
the Shadow" swallows up dolls and people and textbooks and VHS tapes.
It's filled with the sounds of knocking and rattling, far-away shrieks
and moans (Alex Joseph's sound design is superb). You can take all of
this at face value, or you can take it as a metaphor for the destruction
outside those walls, from the war, from the Revolution before it. It
works either way.
The trauma of war and societal upheaval is
rendered human-sized in "Under the Shadow," even with the paranormal
elements. Anvari is Iranian-born, with childhood memories of the
Revolution and the years following. "Under the Shadow" is clearly a
personal film, and Anvari has assembled an extremely talented team to
make that a reality. Production designer Nasser Zoubi and set decorator
Karim Kheir create the period gently, without a hint of nostalgic
fetishism. The visual effects are sparingly used but truly spooky, and
there are many spine-chilling scream-worthy moments.
The two leads, Rashidi and Manshadi, create a relationship prickling
with tension and impatience, exploding into mutual rage and suspicion.
It is amazing to consider that this is Manshadi's debut. When she digs
her heels in, she really digs her heels in. Her eyes squint with
hostility when she looks at her mother tearing apart a bedroom looking
for the missing doll. Dorsa sees things her mother cannot. She speaks to
entities that are not there. She believes. Rashidi's visceral
performance is meticulously structured in its emotional progression,
although the end result does not feel "structured" at all. What we see
is a woman losing her mind. The cracks in the ceiling open ... what will
come through? Can it be kept out? Will the solid ever be solid again?
There is no escape, for characters or audience. "Under the Shadow" is
unnerving in the extreme.
Final rating: 10/10 for the genre and 8/10 overall and it is the best example of a movie from an off stream producer and country which is anything else than off stream.
Thanks for reading and have fun watching movies.
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