Under the Shadow

• Director Babak Anvari shot the film in just 21 days on a tight budget, leaning on natural light and shadow-heavy staging to build the oppressive atmosphere.
• Anvari couldn't shoot in Iran at all — Iranian censorship rules forbid depicting a woman without her hijab even in her own private apartment, which the story required — so the production recreated 1980s Tehran in Amman, Jordan instead.
• The djinn is conveyed almost entirely through low-tech practical means (billowing fabric, chador-like shapes, wind) rather than heavy CGI, with digital effects reserved for only a handful of shots.
• Sound design leans on authentic Iran-Iraq War audio — real air-raid siren recordings and archival wartime sound — drawn partly from Anvari's own childhood memories of the war, to ground the supernatural scares in real history.
• The film was the UK's official submission for Best Foreign Language Film at the 89th Academy Awards (it wasn't nominated) and won the BAFTA for Outstanding Debut.

The djinn is not a supernatural entity but a manifestation of Shideh's crushing guilt over her banned books and failed medical career, with the doll representing the daughter she feels she has failed to protect.

The apartment building serves as a purgatory for the women of the revolution, where the endless missile strikes are actually the repetitive loop of their trapped societal status rather than real-time warfare.

The father's absence and the breaking of the mirror symbolize the shattering of the patriarchal family unit, allowing the matriarchal horror of the djinn to fully consume the domestic space.

Tehran, 1980s. A disgraced med student and her daughter rot in an apartment block while missiles scream overhead. But the real terror isn't the Ba'athist war; it's the djinn sliding under the door. Shideh's feminist past haunts her as the entity weaponizes her guilt, turning a child's doll into a conduit for supernatural dread. This isn't a ghost story; it's a siege movie where the enemy exploits post-revolutionary paranoia. As the building empties and the power cuts, the line between political oppression and ancient folklore dissolves into pure, claustrophobic nightmare.