‘They say the djinn is a spirit that steals those they want to possess…’
If you’re not a parent, you’ll get bored with people saying things like “nothing can prepare you for parenthood” or “nobody can explain what it’s like”, and then you become a parent, and you find yourself rolling out all of those cliches yourself. Parenthood is magical, and life-affirming, and beautiful and all the rest of it, but it’s also pressure. Constant pressure. And that pressure is usually worse for the mother. As a result of this, there are many films in which that pressure is personified. As a Babadook, perhaps. Or as a Dijinn…
In wartorn Iran in the 1980s, former medical student Shideh (Narges Rashidi) is left alone to care for her daughter, Dorsa (Avin Manshadi), after her husband is called into military service as a doctor. As the city crumbles around them due to constant bomb attacks, Dorsa begins acting strangely. Seeing things that aren’t there. Talking to nobody. Is she just succumbing to her old childhood anxieties, or is there something more sinister afoot?
I think the thing that both The Babadook and Under the Shadow get right is how much guilt is a constant throughout parenthood. Am I doing enough? Am I doing too much? Nobody is perfect, but with your children, you desperately want to be and are destined to always fall short. In Under the Shadow, that guilt manifests as shrieking alarms and the distant rumble of explosions. As with the Babadook, the entity that haunts the characters here is rarely glimpsed (although it is terrifying when it does appear), and one of the more insidious tricks pulled by the Dijinn is to make Shideh feel totally alone. Phone calls become accusations, another reflection of a mother’s guilt.
Under the Shadow explores themes that date back all the way to Rosemary’s Baby, but first-time writer-director Babak Anvari uses his experiences of growing up in war-torn Tehran to imbue his debut feature with a freshness and ingenuity that ensures this film will continue to get under the skin of audiences everywhere for a long while to come.
