Critics reviews

Probably the most impressive thing about Under the Shadow is how it manages to integrate the social and political realities of its chosen time and place into the demands of a genre narrative, unlike Stranger Things, which shamelessly fetishizes its period signifiers before imposing just enough strenuously present-tense political correctness to ensure that critics won't mistake it for something authentically retrograde.

While this modern, educated woman dismisses the "fairy tale" of the djinn, she also refuses to flee the city without Dorsa's missing doll: it's said if the djinn gets ahold of a treasured belonging, you'll always be marked. This movie's howling winds are borne of fears at once personal, political and mythic.

When the background noise drops out, the silence is deafening. Something terrible is happening. The chaos in the outside world infiltrates the interior. "Under the Shadow," a Farsi-language debut feature written and directed by Babak Anvari, creates a world where reality itself is suspect. In a year filled with great first features, add "Under the Shadow" to the list.

The creaking and shrieking inside a haunted-house movie often turn on evil spirits, restless ghosts or sometimes just human madness. It takes time before the creepy noises are fully revealed in the quietly nerve-pricking horror flick "Under the Shadow," though there's already plenty to worry about before the first real boo erupts.

Anvari's great accomplishment with this film — especially in the second half — is allowing his story to gather moral, symbolic force without shortchanging the simple pleasures of genre. The jump scares are solid, and earned. The suspense is genuine. And Under the Shadow never loses sight of the basic human reality of mother and child, trapped at home, encircled by a variety of evils, both real and imagined.

Though ostensibly a horror movie, Babak Anvari's Under the Shadow is also a bluntly effective screed on everyday female suppression... Yet there's something naggingly formulaic about how the film plays out. It's that old question that comes up in ‘found footage' movies: why is someone filming this? In this case, why doesn't Shideh's basic survival instinct kick?

Even if the supernatural elements feel half-baked, Anvari's film compensates by giving those elements a surprising amount of metaphorical depth.

Infused with autobiographical elements, Babak Anvari's debut feature is a terrifying allegory of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War, a now often overlooked conflict that shaped much of this London-based Iranian filmmaker's early childhood. [It's] a constantly shifting expressionistic nightmare.

Like an Iranian take on The Babadook, writer-director Babak Anvari's Under the Shadow is an emotionally direct and realistic horror story centered around a socially isolated mother and child who are terrorized by eerie supernatural events... Anvari keeps things creepy in part by leaving open the possibility that there really may be something supernatural gripping his milieu.

[One] exceptional psychological horror film about the madness of living in an actual war zone, where after a while it becomes impossible to distinguish whether danger is real or imagined, was Under the Shadow... In Farsi with English subtitles, the film binds political specificity and a chilling feminist critique to horror film tropes.

Though it ultimately falls back on the usual pileup of scare tactics — floating things, gooey things, sudden forms emerging from the shadows — Anvari uses this toolbox in a pointed fashion. "Under the Shadow" smartly observes the emotions stirred up by a world defined by restrictions, and the terrifying possibility that they might be inescapable.