Under the Shadow

Tehran, 1988. Shideh was studying to be a doctor before the revolution ended that. Her past political activism got her barred from the university she'd built her life around, and the authorities who made that decision aren't done with her. When her husband Iraj is conscripted and sent to a field hospital, he asks her to take their young daughter Dorsa and leave Tehran. Shideh refuses — partly out of stubbornness, partly because leaving feels like one more thing taken from her. They stay. The building empties around them.

A missile strikes their building but doesn't fully detonate. It lodges in the upper floors, a dead weight above their heads. An elderly neighbor, superstitious and matter-of-fact about it, tells Shideh that missiles from certain regions carry djinn — spirits that attach to objects and wait. Shortly after, Dorsa's beloved doll disappears. Dorsa begins repeating phrases she shouldn't know. She starts sleeping beneath a cloth she refuses to remove, and she asks Shideh not to open the windows.

Shideh starts to unravel. She has nightmares she can't shake after waking. A veiled figure moves at the edge of rooms. Objects shift. She begins to doubt her own mind, cycling between fear that the building is genuinely haunted and fear that she's losing her grip on reality. Her relationship with Dorsa fractures under the strain — she is short, frightened, and increasingly alone. The last neighbors leave. The air raids continue. The two of them are the only ones left.

The djinn's hold on Dorsa tightens. Shideh finally breaks and tries to flee — but she steps outside without her identity papers and without her hijab, and is immediately stopped by revolutionary guards. She is berated, humiliated, and released. It is a reminder, arriving in the middle of a supernatural crisis, that the state is always watching and the walls are everywhere, not just in the apartment. She goes back.

The final confrontation strips away any ambiguity. The djinn has found the shape that frightens Shideh most: it wears her own face. She tears the doll from its reach, and she and Dorsa escape into the street. They survive. But the war is still happening. The regime is still there. Shideh is still barred from medicine, still waiting for a husband who may or may not come back, still living in a country that treats her as a problem to be managed. The djinn is gone. Nothing else has changed.