Recommendation | Are Men Demons?

Are men demons? This a strange question, but it pops up more than once while watching “Under the Shadow,” the Farsi-speaking debut film of Babak Anvari. It happens when the central and dominant metaphor in the movie is women being subordinated to a male shadow.

“Under the Shadow” was released in 2016 as a co-production financed and co-produced by Qatar, Jordan, Iran, and Great Britain. It was screened in the world premiere at the Sands Festival (in Israel, at the Haifa Film Festival). It is currently available to watch on Netflix.

Under the Shadow poster, a movie directed by Babak Anvari, United Kingdom/ Jordan/ Qatar / Iran, 2016

The Iranian film, which belongs to the horror genre, opens at a relatively lukewarm temperature, characterized by stylistic banality and a familiar family drama. Still, it gets warmer and warmer until Bam!!! The horror is flung directly upon us, the viewers, shaking and stirring us. There are genuinely frightening moments in the film, immersed in existential anxieties, which characterize families against a background of uncertainty and lack of existential control, where the growing mental tension reflects the found panic.

In the center of the film, Sheida (played by Narges Rashidi, an actress born in Tehran who lives in Germany), a former student and left-wing activist who was involved in the 1979 coup in Tehran by Khomeini’s people. A few years have passed, and the country has undergone a transformation. When Sheida comes to resume her medical studies at the University of Tehran, she is refused as the Muslim dean decides to punish her for her past. The dean’s opacity later becomes a central marker of the multitude of male characters and the oppression outlined in the film, when the man’s control is expressed not only outside the home, in professional barriers, but also when Sheida is required to put on hijab and long clothes, contrary to her worldview at “home”. And if on the outside she is a modest woman covered from head to toe, at home, inside, she appears as a Western, realistic, and liberal woman, free and open-minded (exercising in front of a Jane Fonda videotape like the typical American housewife), but narratively, also at her own home she is under the judging eye of her husband, whether if he is present or present-absent in forcing her to absorb the guilty feeling for her mal-functioning motherhood.

Workout with Jane Fonda, picture was taken from the movie “Under the Shadow”

Sheida’s husband, a doctor by profession, hurries off on a mission at the war front (the period was the Iran-Iraq war). He advises his wife not to stay in Tehran and move to his parents’ house, but she strongly opposes what she sees as the elimination of her control and independence. Their daughter, Dorsa, is a spoiled only child who is very attached to her doll. She strangely connects with a new boy in the building, who came to live with his uncles, the Ibrahim family, after his parents were killed in the inferno.

Sheida’s house is crowded with drawers and chests full of secrets. Her daily routine is measured between aerobics classes in front of the T.V. screen (Jane Fonda, as mentioned), which is also hidden in one of the dressers in the house and running with her family to the shelter (Tehran was attacked with missiles during the Iran-Iraq war – U.A.). The medical physiology book, which she received with a dedication from her mother, is hastily locked in one of the closets. The house’s atmosphere seems saturated with memories and an attempt to escape from them. But the mother-daughter relationship equation (including the mother’s fear vs. the daughter’s fear and vice versa) takes an exciting and sharp turn that shocks the parental relationship. As the horror of the war permeates the house and a missile hits the building, a feeling closes in on the viewer that the dead mother or other spirits are present between the house cracks.

A rocket hits a building. Image from “Under the Shadow”

Following the missile fall, presented in a clumsy but incredibly aesthetic way, one of the neighbors dies of cardiac arrest. Dorsa’s beloved doll disappears, and her anxiety grows. Dorsa wets at night and behaves strangely. She tells her mother that the new boy who lives with the neighbors told her the legend of Hadjin and gave her a charm to protect her, only Sheida threw it in the trash while tidying Dorsa’s room. Later, it turns out that the child has a mouth defect due to the trauma he experienced, and he cannot speak at all. The girl claims evil spirits and demons are in the building, while the mother cancels her out, not believing in superstitions. That is… until she meets the demons herself. The film undergoes a weird turn that leaves the mother and daughter alone in the building, attacked by a demon, and the metaphors celebrate fear.

The metaphors celebrating fear, picture from “Under the Shadow”

Many elements in the movie are characterized by a surreal, fantastic, and disproportionate aesthetic, with the British photographer Kit Fraser playing with the placement of the frames, from length to width, and with warm filters that romanticize menace. Anwari, who fled the terror of Iraqi missiles with his family to England, expresses well as a director the tension between the two worldviews, shaping them with stylistic elements of “open” / “closed”, also worth mentioning is the beautiful expression of thinking about the void and the act of emptying as a dynamic element – the husband, Dorsa’s nanny, and the neighbors all leave, including eventually the Ibrahims, and finally the remaining one, the demon of fear, which nurses its existence precisely when the city is empty when the building is empty when we are asleep. It is slightly reminiscent of streets under siege, with murderous birds hovering overhead and a group of people trapped between the thin walls and dubious glazing of the house.

The feeling of this trampling, permeating fear, and the birds that turn into demons are a warm greeting from Hitchcock’s cinematic vacuum. But Hitchcock not only wakes the demons from their slumber but also brings the female demons out of the bottle from under the shadow.