written and directed by: Babak Anvari
starring: Narges Rashidi, Avin Manshadi, Bobby Naderi
seen on 8th February, 2020
Best film ever. If I were to compare it to something, it would be Polanski's "Repulsion". Polanski uses atributes of the horror genre to depict psychological discomfort of his heroine, her distress comes deep from within her and societal pressure is a secondary character in his story, whereas "Under the Shadow" deals with the opossite situation: the heroine and her deepest self are being attacked from the outside, and the director translates and visualizes her suffering through understandable tropes of spooky movies.
I read a bunch of comments online that said things like "the main character is being a real cow the entire time", as if they spotted a flaw in the film by being the brightest and the smartest, without also noticing that was the point of the whole thing. It's about frustration, about being tired, about being unable to defend oneself. There is a war going on around. WAR! The heroine is under constant attack as a citizen of her country, is under constant attack as a person with a political opinion in an unfree country, is under constant attack as a person yearning for self-realization, is under constant attack just for being born a woman. The film does not glamorize her behavior or her irritated reactions, on the contrary, she gets put through hell. I don't deny anyone the right to say they didn't like the film, thought it was bad or uninteresting, but I do not like to see someone watching a film about going crazy from something unimaginable and then criticizing the heroine for being crazy.
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