Living "Under the Shadow" of Feminist Horror

Hello!

A dear friend and graduate school colleague of mine shared a great horror movie with me recently.  It's called "Under the Shadow" (2016).

It tells the story of a mother and daughter stranded in post-revolution Tehran and the parallel terrors of the city's constant bombardment as Iran battles Iraq and being hunted by a child-hungry demon.

The stage is set as Shideh, played by Narges Rashidi, is conclusively informed that she will be blocked from completing her studies to become a doctor.  As the film unfolds, the claustrophobia of living in a society with newly-introduced sweeping oppression of women slowly suffocates.  Shideh hides the fact that the family owns a VCR from strangers, appears to be the only woman left in her neighborhood who still drives, and must cover herself head-to-toe when she leaves her home--even, we learn, as she flees her apartment in the middle of the night with her child--because the religious police are waiting to scoop her up for any failure to cooperate in her own subjugation.  "Under the Shadow" reminds us, as the serialized version of "A Handmaid's Tale" rivets viewers, that a horrifying reversal in women's liberties in a previously modernized society is hardly a fiction; it is chillingly and recently possible.

The claustrophobia only deepens when a bomb lands, but fails to detonate, on Shideh's apartment building.  Although Shideh has determined that leaving is impossible, as the bomb threatens to explode and a lurking evil makes itself increasingly evident, remaining begins to stretch the limits of her sanity.  The images of the hulking explosive puncturing the roof of the building harken to another favorite horror movie of mine, 2001's "The Devil's Backbone", which featured a rusting World War II bomb nose-down in an orphanage's courtyard as a pointed symbol of the fearful forces residing in the surrounding buildings.

Awkward?

Driving Shideh's aforementioned midnight flight is the increasingly aggressive pursuit of a djinn, a demon who wishes to ensnare Shideh's young daughter Dorsa (played by Avin Manshadi).  The djinn first manifests as a mysterious fever striking Dorsa soon after the bomb lands on their building and their upstairs neighbor dies, possibly of frank fright, possibly due to a darker force.  Shideh struggles to banish Dorsa's fever, becoming increasingly exasperated and cabin-fevered as her daugher's malaise-driven whining and her own feelings of inefficacy grate her last nerve.  Ominous portents accumulate as this and other more minor signals that something is amiss build into more overt actions by the djinn.  Shideh frays between the impossibility of djinn actually existing and the urgent wish to protect Dorsa from demonic kidnapping.  As a portrait of ambivalent motherhood under terrorizing circumstances, "Under the Shadow" finds its partner in the deliciously terrifying Australian horror film "The Babadook" (2014).

All the scary things!

Between resonances with other excellent horror and its fresh perspective on scary storytelling, "Under the Shadow" is a well-crafted and scarily fun film.  It's Rotten Tomatoes certified fresh, and you can watch it on Netflix!

I gave it a 4.

Go watch it!

{Heart}