This is a small, quiet little horror movie that flew under the radar, and I haven't heard anything about it, but the plot sounded compelling, so I decided to check it out. It always makes me sad when a really good movie doesn't get the recognition it deserves. There are a lot of crappy movies that I hear about nonstop, and I wish movies like this would get more fanfare.
This movie takes place in war-torn post-revolutionary Tehran in the 1980s. A young medical student is barred from continuing her medical studies because of her involvement with leftist student groups during the war. She lives with her daughter in an area still torn apart by violence. Her husband is called to serve in the military, and she decides to stay with her daughter in their home instead of moving to stay with his parents in a safer area. Soon their problems become even worse, when strange, terrifying events start happening, and she becomes convinced that she and her daughter are being tormented by evil spirits.
This movie is a Persian-language horror film written and directed by Iranian-born Babak Anvari as his directorial debut. It feels more authentic because of all of the horrors going on around the characters before anything supernatural even happens. An early scene features a stray missile crashing into their apartment building and everyone has to evacuate in case it explodes. That's a tense and scary situation to live in all by itself, which makes the movie feel catastrophic right from the beginning.
As usual in movies like this, the little girl seems to realize that evil spirits are attacking before any of the adults see it. The daughter keeps saying that the djinn are attacking, while her mother insists they aren't real, even after she's seen a lot of scary, unexplainable things herself. Once she realizes that something evil is going on, she tries her best to protect her daughter, even sacrificing her own safety. It's very compelling. This is such a good movie that I wish more people had heard of it.
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