UNDER THE SHADOW

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Kathleen Norris on UNDER THE SHADOW: IRANIAN HORROR

I’ve seen many contemporary Iranian movies, but never encountered one promoted as a horror film until I watched Under the Shadow (above), a film set in 1988, during the lengthy and brutal Iran-Iraq War. I found it interesting that the movie contained none of what is standard in so many American horror films. No blood is shed, and while there were some intensely suspenseful moments, only one made me jump. I wonder if this is partly because the real horrors of war are so evident in the film, as missiles from Iran land in apartment buildings in Teheran, including the one in which our protagonists, a mother, her husband, and Dorsa, their six-year-old daughter, reside.

I also wondered if the director was using the genre of horror in order to subvert it, and make a comment on the normalized horrors of living under an extremely oppressive theocracy. The film opens with a scene of a woman, Shideh (Narges Rashidi) being told that she can no longer continue her medical studies in post-revolutionary Iran. Her lifelong dream shattered, she gets rid of her textbooks, keeping only the one her now-deceased mother had given her and inscribed. Shideh and her husband are modern, educated people, but before he is called away to serve as a combat medic her physician husband crushes her even more when he says he believes that her desire to become a doctor is a fantasy she’s pursuing at the expense of doing her duty as a mother. In Iran, the scene depicting his cruel dismissal and her pained response might be considered a protest.

Later when a missile strikes an apartment in their building but does not detonate, the elderly man living there suffers a heart attack. The other residents know that Shideh has been a medical student and ask her to help. She administers CPR but cannot save him, and wonders if she had been able to continue her medical studies the results would have been different.