As Babak Anvari’s elegant ghost story opens, Shideh (Narges Rashidi), a young mother and former medical student, is informed that she will never be allowed to resume her studies in post-revolution Iran.
The news only compounds an already fraught situation. Its 1988, at the height of the Iran-Iraq war, and Shideh and her neighbours take nightly refuge from Iraqi bombardment.
Her mother, we learn, has died recently. Relations are not good with her young daughter, Dorsa (Avin Manshadi), nor with her husband, a medic, who is summoned to the frontlines, But not before we’ve witnessed a few blazing familial rows. When he argues that Shideh’s professional ambitions exist only to fulfil her late mother’s aspirations, Shideh shoots back: “Dead people can’t dream.”
The phrase has a double meaning. Shideh may have a pulse but she does not have much of a life under a regime, which, we soon witness, is prepared to arrest her for fleeing in terror, but without covering her head.
The neighbours soon start to leave their Tehran block, around the same time that Dorsa starts to complain about things – not just the shelling – going bump in the night. Old residents speak of old superstitions. Are the stressed family unit imagining things? Is this a folie à deux or a haunting?
You wait ages for a horror film with socio-political nous and then Train to Busan and Under the Shadow arrive in lickety-split succession. In common with A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, this British entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 89th Academy Awards, plays neat feminist games with familiar tropes.
Babak Anvari works a great, slow-burning jump-scare, even if the film is structurally just a teeny bit lopsided: the set-up certainly takes its sweet time, and the final credits roll where the coda ought to be.
No matter: there are so many appealing textures to enjoy. The spectre draws additional powers from djinn mythology and theocracy, supernatural monsters and real-world terrors.
Narges Rashidi makes for a suitably multifaceted final girl. DOP Kit Fraser does Deakinsian things with light and shadow. Gavin Cullen’s score creeps. Prepare to be spooked.
