Critics reviews

The Seed of the Sacred Fig itself shape-shifts from a quiet study of a close-knit foursome into a high-octane thriller. The film is, as a result, a portrait of how Rasoulof perceives the systematic oppression within his home country, from which he is now exiled.

The Seed of the Sacred Fig, quite possibly the director’s pièce de résistance in an oeuvre long conversant with everyday Iranian life and critical of the Islamist regime under which it unfolds, brims with the germs of many ideas and sows them far and wide over a sprawling runtime.

“The Seed of the Sacred Fig”... is a slow burn, sometimes a tad too slow. Occasionally languid, close-cropped shots that seem intended to produce visual poetry go on a bit too long. But those sequences are a minor distraction, and the rest of the film’s methodical pace, its deliberate unfolding of the family’s growing rifts, feels almost classical, as if we’re watching an old legend fitted to a new age.

A film that begins with the kind of political urgency and nerve-racking paranoia of Costa-Gavras’s Z (1969) seems to run out of steam when Rasoulof ditches everything he’s built up as a penetrating look at the invasive political life in Iran and turns it into what I can only describe as a pared-down remake of The Shining (1980).

As much as this 165-minute epic’s sermonizing approach might want for more subtlety, sometimes recalling a PSA, it’s refreshingly balanced and open in its inclusion of differing perspectives.

The Seed of the Sacred Fig [is] less challenging than its fraught production history would suggest; in fact, the only frenetic energy that pushes the chronology forward is the anxiety that comes with shooting a film in secret. Although this lends a harrowing quality to the cinematography from Pooyan Aghababaei, the absence of character complexity in favor of blatant symbolism drags the film down in a way that is neither entertaining nor particularly thought-provoking.

It’s no wonder that Rasoulof opted to flee the country upon learning that authorities were onto his film production and would soon carry out his pending sentence of imprisonment and flogging. But his film deserves to be regarded on its own terms, as an eloquent record of and warning to a regime clinging to power at the expense of freedom.

The Seed of the Sacred Fig is a powerful reminder of the revolutionary power of filmmaking in a world that so desperately needs it, with the current political situation both in Iran and everywhere around the world.

Though the film is epic in length and ambitious in subject, it also has a hurried, shoestring quality... The Seed of the Sacred Fig ultimately becomes a melodrama of resistance.

It shows just how casually a repressive society employs the tools of authoritarianism and psychological intimidation. Even close family members can’t be trusted. Friends suddenly become interrogators; minor missteps mean major prison time. To make this film secretively and to show it to an international film festival is an act of true courage and artistry.

Building slowly, the story morphs into a thriller, and finally a sort of horror film, though these parts feel more like decent imitations than real genre work.

Each of the performances here, understated and never melodramatic, is inherently brave for the way the actors risked their lives to participate in the film at all.