Babak Anvari
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Filmography
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Connections, in both directions
While "Under the Shadow" has much in common with " The Babadook ," especially in its portrayal of shared sleep-deprivation in mother and child as well as an interior that morphs into a nightmarescape before our eyes, it is also reminiscent of Roman Polanski's "Repulsion," where grasping arms emerge from hallway walls suddenly, soft like clay, and gigantic cracks shiver across walls and ceiling.
Household items vanish, furniture is rearranged when there’s apparently no one there, and a symbolic crack in the plaster mirrors the family’s mental and spiritual undoing (shades of Polanski’s Repulsion).
Yet as with Polanski ’s Repulsion and The Tenant (which Anvari has cited as influential), such boundaries remain fluid and we are never dispossessed of the notion that Dorsa really is the target of wandering spirits, plotting to steal her away like her beloved doll, Kimia.
Movies like Dark Water , The Conjuring , and The Babadook have similarly sought to explore the psychology of motherhood in horror terms, and Under the Shadow is a strong addition to the mix.
Babak Anvari’s debut has been compared to Jennifer Kent’s phenomenal The Babadook, and genre fans should be excited to hear it’s not just because both films feature a difficult relationship between a mother and her child and a metaphor-laden supernatural foe.
Instead, "Under the Shadow" bears a closer similarity to "The Babadook," released the same year, which also focused on a mother protecting her kid from an an eerie, largely unseen figure who may or may not be a metaphor for psychological duress.
Under the Shadow is this year’s The Babadook.
But Anvari is merely controlling our expectations as he prepares his fright assault, putting a mother and child in the kind of psycho-supernatural peril that recalls any number of genre standouts, from Poltergeist to The Babadook.
To make a recent comparison (and to a film that also played at Sundance), Under the Shadow is similar to the The Babadook in that it’s not really about the monster; it’s about what the monster represents in the relationship between a mother and child.
The Devil's Backbone (2001)
Directed by Guillermo del Toro
influenced Under the Shadow (2016)
Themes Plot
Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone is clearly a strong influence, with its use of the spectre of conflict (and an unexploded bomb).
After a bomb hits the upper floor of their building – but, in shades of Guillermo del Toro’s similar tale of history’s ghosts The Devil’s Backbone (2001), fails to explode – literal cracks form in the fabric of the already fraught family environment, things go bump in the night, and Shideh’s disturbing dreams start leaking into reality.
When a dud missile lodges into the apartment’s ceiling – recalling a strikingly similar unexploded bomb in Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone, also set in wartime – fleeting apparitions make their presence known.
Yet despite their shared language and genre, this ghostly gem owes less to Ana Lily Amirpour’s monochrome vampire fable than to the Spanish civil war fantasy of Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone and the maternal sacrifice of Hideo Nakata’s Dark Water .
While Anvari’s film nods toward Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, it is very much its own movie, thanks to the unusual milieu and the viewer’s uncertainty as to whether the terrific Rashidi is playing the protector or the persecutor — the Wendy or the Jack Torrance — of her character’s offspring.
In a tightly controlled chiller that carries a whiff of mother-daughter horror classics such as “Poltergeist” and “The Exorcist,” an embattled mom (Narges Rashidi) is left alone in her apartment with her little one, Dorsa (Avin Manshadi), while her husband is off tending to wounded soldiers.
In this way, both films bow to the enduring ingeniousness of The Exorcist, where William Friedkin understood the potency of turning an innocent little girl into a (crab-) walking alienation effect.
Relic also offers a fresh take on the classic haunted house film, its use of metaphor reminiscent of Babak Anvari’s Under the Shadow .
But Anvari is merely controlling our expectations as he prepares his fright assault, putting a mother and child in the kind of psycho-supernatural peril that recalls any number of genre standouts, from Poltergeist to The Babadook.
In a tightly controlled chiller that carries a whiff of mother-daughter horror classics such as “Poltergeist” and “The Exorcist,” an embattled mom (Narges Rashidi) is left alone in her apartment with her little one, Dorsa (Avin Manshadi), while her husband is off tending to wounded soldiers.
If this were Poltergeist, JoBeth Williams could flee a haunted house in the middle of the night without being arrested by religious police who think a woman on the streets without a hijab is a more serious violation of the natural order of things than child-snatching ghosts.
Comparison seems inevitable at first with the intense domestic dramas of fellow Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, notably A Separation.
Imagine A Separation playing out inside a haunted house, suggests Mike McCahill.
In this way, I’m motivated to compare it to Iranian film Under The Shadow (2016), in the sense that it utilizes the frustratingly persistent norms of its national identity to recontextualize the more recognizable elements of the genre.
The anxieties of motherhood have fueled many a great horror movie, from Rosemary’s Baby to The Babadook, and in Babak Anvari’s mostly terrifying Under the Shadow, maternal angst does battle not just with demons from the beyond but also social and political upheaval.
Hell, it isn’t even a real subversion a la 2016’s Don’t Breathe , but I Came By is just as dark.
Anvari is not a pretentious filmmaker: it’s a good bet that he was raised on the same Amblin entertainments as the Duffers, or, for that matter, David Robert Mitchell (It Follows) and Robert Eggers (The Witch).
It’s Paranormal Activity Teheran style in this realistically told little haunted house story set against the backdrop of true-life horror.
To put it simply, “I Came By” is kind of a cross between “Summer of 84” and “Don’t Breathe.”
Movies like Dark Water , The Conjuring , and The Babadook have similarly sought to explore the psychology of motherhood in horror terms, and Under the Shadow is a strong addition to the mix.