Sixteen years ago, with movies such as Audition and The Ring, we saw the birth of J-horror: horror from Japan. And who knows? Maybe this smart, claustrophobic picture will herald the beginning of I-horror: scary movies from Iran. Babak Anvari’s Under the Shadow is an extremely disturbing ghost story set in Tehran during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war: a parable of supernatural invasion that has something to say about national vulnerability and women’s condition under the veil.
Shideh (Narges Rashidi) is a wife, mother and former medical student who is forbidden to resume her studies due to a former association with a secular left political group. This ruling is particularly painful, as being a doctor was her mother’s dearest wish for her – and her mother died recently. Shideh has western tastes: she secretly works out in a leotard to a Jane Fonda tape on her (forbidden) VCR and hurriedly pulls on a veil to answer the door.
Her doctor-husband is unsupportive and questions her fitness as a mother to their young daughter, Dorsa (Avin Manshadi). When he has to leave on a military hospital posting, an Iraqi bomb blows a hole in the roof and Dorsa is convinced that a djinn has got in – a ghost in the form of a cloaked woman.
This chilling story has something of Polanski and Lynch, and scenes showing uneasy relations with the neighbours looked like something by Asghar Farhadi. It is elegantly shot and very well acted. A definite frisson.
