Shideh is stuck. She can’t return to medical school. She is a bad daughter, mother, wife. She does her VHS exercise videos and tarries around the apartment, trying not to socialize with the neighbors.
Shideh’s tension-filled listlessness and self-judgment — up until the very point of life and death — are the heart of the 2016 movie “Under the Shadow.”
The layers of drama build and build: there are the social barriers that Shideh experiences as a female academic in Tehran; her marital strife and parental anxiety; the gossiping, judgmental neighbors at her doorstep; there is her daughter’s rising fever; a menacing djinn; and a literal war that threatens to intrude on all of it.
And what does our Shideh have to protect herself from it all?
Denial. Repression. Sublimation.
But that can only last her so long, especially when the very architecture of her denial is pierced by a fricken missile.
What’s the deal?
Former medical student and revolutionary Shideh tries to return to school but is disallowed. This is 1988 in post-revolutionary Tehran. Her husband is called into service and he urges her to leave the city with their daughter Dorsa and stay with his family, but she resists.
A spooky boy moves into their building; he has seen some shit. He gives Dorsa a charm to ward off evil spirits (djinn) but Shideh thinks the boy is far too spooky and throws the charm away. Dorsa develops a fever and Shideh starts to have nightmares. Paranoia grows between the two.
A missile strikes their building and Dorsa’s favorite doll goes missing, supposedly stolen by a djinn. Everyone has left; Dorsa and Shideh are the only remaining occupants of the building. As the shelling continues, Shideh’s items start to go missing, too.
Shideh decides it’s time to flee but Dorsa won’t leave without her doll. What follows is a djinn vs. mom face-off and a successful narrow escape, with the dun-dun-dun implication that the djinn has not been vanquished after all.
I can’t stop thinking about...
The rituals that keep us safe.
I mean this from a psychological, clinical, superstitious, everyday, etcetera perspective — all of the rituals that we do all of the time that we assign relative protective benefit to, from washing our vegetables to locking our doors.
An image that has stuck with me since watching the movie is Shideh putting duct tape “X”s on her windows... to protect against missiles.
Yes, I understand that the tape is supposed to keep the windows from shattering if a missile falls nearby. I understand that. But it is a bit like putting on an oxygen mask onboard a free-falling plane.
Some of the rituals that we imagine keep us safe are really just a form of denial. If I tape the windows, the missiles won’t harm us.
If I lay a line of salt in the doorway, the demons can’t get in.
The truth is that it doesn’t work. We can’t keep ourselves or anyone safe. But accepting this — relinquishing the denial of false safety for ourselves and our family — is too horrific.
Because when we give up our denial, we are called to fight our evils head-on, in whatever form they choose to take.
Boo,
Horrorshow Jane