Under the Shadow

It's the 1980s and aspiring doctor "Shideh" (Narges Rashidi) has found that one of the side effects of the recent Iranian revolution is that she's been kicked out of medical school. They don't need women to be doctors, apparently, so just go home and bring up your daughter "Dorsa" (Mia Sinclair Jenness) whilst your husband "Iraj" (Bobby Naderi) does his bit on the front line of the war against Iraq. Aside from terrifying her for his safety, this also causes a degree of chagrin from "Shideh" as he happens to be a doctor, too. He advises them to quit Tehran and go and live with his much more traditional mother, but she isn't so keen on that idea so decides they will just stay at home. With the missiles and bombs landing all around them, the young "Dorsa" starts to miss her favourite doll, then she develops a persistent fever and finally starts having nightmares about seeing something malevolent that tells her her mother doesn't care anymore. Now upset and confused, "Shideh" has to get to the bottom of a mystery that might well have more to do with the supernatural than with a neighbour downstairs winding up her child. I reckon that most horror movies fall down because there is something too formulaic about them, the beginning, middle then usually quite hysterically performed and scored ending rarely vary from the well walked black-brick road. This is a little different, though, as it bases it's dread on the evil fantasies of another culture altogether and, perhaps more intriguingly, those aspects that slightly fly in the face of more Western interpretations of "Djinn" (or genies). There's no Robin Williams here. On another level, there is an horror of a different sort as we watch a perfectly competent character barred from her vocation by virtue of her sex and caught up in a zealousness that could hardly be described as progressive - and that is quite effectively illustrated by Bijan Daneshman's "Director". With that menacing scene set, though, I must admit that I wasn't at all convinced by Rashidi. As the panic and histrionics build between her and the more plausible Jenness, I felt she was doing it all a little too much by numbers and after a while I just didn't much like her character at all, either. For a film that's so much about soul and possession, she turned in something remarkably soul-less and I was never persuaded that she wasn't just acting. Still, this effectively shies away from ceiling-spinning special effects and relies more on the psychology of fear to tell it's tale - and I reckon it's well worth eighty minutes.