By now, Iranian films have a rather respectable representation in this blog but this is the very first Iranian horror film I have ever watched. Indeed, I was somewhat surprised that they even made horror films. In truth, this is an international co-production but with Iranian directors, performers and being set in Tehran, I think it comes close enough to qualify as an Iranian film.

Shideh and her husband live with their daughter Dorsa in Tehran during the height of the Iran-Iraq War. Already under stress due to living under the threat of constant bombardment, she is further upset when she is refused permission by the university to continue her studies due to her involvement with activism during the revolution and the fact that her husband is sent somewhere near the fighting to serve as a doctor. One day a missile strikes their building but fails to explode, causing many of the residents to make plans to flee the city. Following this, Dorsa and later Shideh start seeing strange things, with Dorsa in particular by a mysterious mute neighbor boy of the Jinn. After the rest of the building’s residents have left, things become so bad that Shideh plans to leave as well but Dorsa has lost her precious doll and she insists that it has been taken upstairs to the apartment where the missile landed.

Though I knew that this counted as a film in the horror genre, I had no idea what kind of horror film it was and wondered if it even had any supernatural elements as those might be considered un-Islamic. The surprise is that not only does it very much have supernatural elements, it hews pretty closely to conventional Hollywood-style horror films as well. This isn’t a good thing since it trots out the old, familiar horror tropes: jump scares, mysterious apparitions flitting across the field of vision, children claiming to see and hear things that adults don’t, the works. What’s annoying is that there’s no myth-building, no thematic consistency to all the supernatural events. Shideh digs out a book that describes the Jinn as spirits of the air but nothing else. There’s no rhyme or reason to all this, exactly as if the director threw in elements just because they felt cool. At one point, the floor turns into a molasses-like substance that pulls at Shideh’s legs which doesn’t fit in at all with what the spirits have been capable of so far. There’s some suggestion that this haunting may be connected with the mute boy, but I was flabbergasted to see that the film ended without any further elaboration of this connection.

At least director Babak Anvari for whom this is the debut feature is skilled enough at keeping tension levels high, such that even jump scares that you are expecting give you a good jolt. I also like it gives familiar horror tropes an Islamic twist. Most of us would recognize a human-shaped billowing white sheet as a ghost but here it is replaced with an all-encompassing chador. Even better is how the film puts it to a dual purpose, both as a ghost and as a symbol of oppression. In one scene, she flees from the house with her daughter but having forgotten to cover her head is picked up by the police. They admonish her and give her a shawl to cover her head but when she returns home she sees herself in the mirror and gets a shock. Another is how the terror of living under the threat of bombardment mingles with the fear of the supernatural. I wished there were more localized, specific elements like this and fewer generic horror tropes. I suspect however that attempting to invoke more explicit Islamic elements could lead to a great deal of trouble.

I still wouldn’t consider Under the Shadow to be a very good film. It’s competently made but mostly very ordinary. At times, the director seems to try to reach for something more ambitious, by implying that there’s an element of child abuse in Shideh’s relationship with Dorsa but never quite gets there. I suspect that many critics included it in their lists of the best films of the year merely due to the inherent exoticism of an Iranian horror movie. Despite my pleasure at having my curiosity satisfied, I can’t recommend it as a good watch.