“They travel on the wind from place to place until they find someone to possess.”

Roughly two-thirds of the way through Babak Anvari’s Under the Shadow, Shideh and her young daughter, Dorsa, are tormented by human-like spirits who enter and leave their apartment through cracks in the ceiling caused by the impact of an unexploded missile. Terrified, Shideh picks her daughter up and runs barefoot into the streets of Tehran wearing only pajama pants and a shirt; her shoulder-length hair hangs loose, uncovered. In 1980s Iran, this is not just taboo, but criminal. She doesn’t even make it a block away from her home before the blinding headlights of a car cause her to stop in her tracks. Two men with machine guns approach her; one of them sarcastically chides, “What’s this look? Are we in Swiss now?”

The next thing we know, Shideh is seated next to Dorsa in a long, grey room wearing a black chādor. She has been arrested for indecency; her crime is punishable with lashes. The cop lets her off with a warning, but it’s a stern one: “A woman should be scared of exposing herself more than anything else,” he says. We see Shideh in close-up as he admonishes her. She listens submissively and stares at the ground. When he is done scolding her, she returns home with her daughter.

It takes a lot of foreboding build-up to get to the supernatural horror that terrorizes Shideh and Dorsa in the film’s final scenes. But the kind of cultural context and social horror that is so viciously clear in this scene is prevalent from the start.

Shideh is a progressive woman in a deeply conservative society. She only wears a hijab if it’s absolutely necessary, preferring to wear casual attire even around male neighbors. At home, she watches Jane Fonda workout tapes on her illegal VHS player and exercises in fairly liberal clothing. She’s not afraid to speak her mind, and her stubbornness puts her at odds with her husband, a doctor who is drafted early on in the film to serve on the front lines of the Iran-Iraq War.

In the movie’s opening scene, Shideh wears that same traditional black chādor as she sits across from the dean of a university, begging him to let her return to medical school. Because of her former political activism, however, that is out of the question. “If I ended up in one of those radical left groups, it was only because I didn’t know any better,” she says, holding back emotion. Behind the cluttered desk, we see Tehran through a window; a missile falls from the sky and detonates on a building in the distance as she finishes speaking. The dean doesn’t even flinch. “Every mistake has consequences,” he says. He tells her to find a new path in life.

After this exchange, the camera is rarely steady; as Shideh’s life unravels, the camera takes on its own anxious energy — much of the cinematography is handheld in most of the movie’s scenes.

Her husband tries to emotionally support her — at least in the immediate aftermath of this news — but it’s also clear that he doesn’t mind that she is being forced by society into taking on a traditional gender role. They sit beside each other on their bed, staring at their plain bedroom wall; the camera lingers outside of the room, framing them through the doorway. “Well, you’ve tried your best,” he says. “It’s out of your hands now. Who knows? It’s probably for the best.” Anvari cuts in to a close-up of Shideh looking disgusted in reaction to that statement, then to a close-up of her taking her hand away from his.

Suddenly, we hear an air raid siren in the distance, and the lights in the apartment dim. They retreat as a family to a bomb shelter in the basement of their apartment building with the rest of their neighbors.

This activity becomes a motif. Multiple times throughout the film, an air raid siren goes off, the lights dim, and Shideh must hide in the bomb shelter. Each time, fewer people join her; one by one, all of her neighbors flee Tehran while she stubbornly stays behind.

Their story takes place during the Iran-Iraq War; every day, an ominous, pervasive threat of destruction and death hovers over the capital city. “Iraq launched a series of strategic bombings on Iranian cities. Iran retaliated in the same way. Lives were plunged into darkness where fear and anxiety thrived,” an opening title card reads.

That fear and anxiety first affects these characters in concrete ways. Tape Xs are placed on all of the apartments’ windows to prevent glass shattering during missile strikes. When the ceiling cracks or other damage occurs, it isn’t patched up, only taped over. Shideh’s husband is deported to Elam, and only communicates with her over a crackling, unreliable phone line. Though they try to live normal lives — kids play together in apartment courtyards and families make future plans — there is nothing normal about their day-to-day existence. The threat of being caught in the crossfire of war is too great.

Eventually, war hits home. A missile strikes their apartment building. Shideh is called upon to try to save an old man’s life as he experiences a heart attack in the aftermath of the blow. We watch her perform CPR on the man in a single, stunning, surreal wide shot; behind her, the huge missile juts out from the ceiling, and a sheer curtain gently blows in the breeze. The old man dies; she breaks down in tears. Later, outside, she expresses her guilt: “If I was a real doctor, he might still be alive.”

A regular construction crane lifts the unexploded missile up and out of the apartment building, and a tarp is laid over the hole that it created. Shideh’s neighbors give her flowers for trying to help. It’s all so tragic, yet so normalized.

After this missile strike, the fear and anxiety that was first predominantly based in reality becomes supernaturally personified.

Dorsa is scared to go to the bathroom at night and talks to her mom about seeing spirits called djinn. Shideh initially dismisses this: “Djinn are just a fairytale made up to scare children,” she tells her child. But there is enough anxiety in their lives without a fear of ghosts coming into the picture, so she finds out who is telling Dorsa about these spirits, then confronts Mehdi’s caretaker to try to get him to stop.

The confrontation plays out in a simple scene, but it elegantly visualizes and dramatizes Shideh’s internal conflicts: traditional Muslim conformity vs. individuality and progressivism, belief vs. non-belief. The two women stand on opposite sides of an open doorway. Shideh lets her hair down and wears layered, fitted clothing. Mehdi’s caretaker is shrouded in a hijab. Shideh laughs at the notion that djinn could be real; the other woman seriously believes in them: “They are very real. It’s even in the Qu’ran,” she says. Mehdi’s caretaker tells her that if the djinn ever take a personal belonging from someone, that person is marked and djinn will always be able to find them. Shideh’s not convinced, but still walks away spooked.

Later, Dorsa’s favorite doll is stolen, and Shideh’s workout tape goes missing.

The terror that the djinn create is real, but they function most strongly as metaphors — visual representations of Shideh and Dorsa’s inner anxieties, guilt, and fear. The spirits strike at random, putting Shideh on constant alert. In this way, they become overt symbols of the anxieties of living in a war zone. They also represent Shideh’s internal conflicts — one of them takes on the appearance of the old man whom she couldn’t save, and another takes on the appearance of a disembodied, black-and-white chādor. The djinn turn Shideh’s daughter against her, playing into Shideh’s fear that she cannot protect her own child from harm.

“You can’t protect Dorsa. You’re useless. You’re nothing but a disappointment!” her husband screams at her over the phone. Is that really his voice being carried over the crackling phone line? Or is that just her inner monologue being brought out into reality by the djinn?

It’s hard to tell. Once the supernatural elements seep into the film, events become more and more disorienting. One scene begins with a shot of Shideh lying in bed, but she is vertical in the center of the frame with her eyes open wide; as she sits up, the camera rights itself, then pans to the foot of the bed to reveal Dorsa staring at her mom. Dorsa says, “Mum, I had a bad dream,” and Shideh embraces her. But as Shideh looks down after saying “Don’t be afraid,” the camera angle is canted, and in her arms is not her daughter, but her daughter’s missing doll…

Since the djinn represent all of Shideh’s pervasive fears and anxieties, it is apt that the djinn’s final form is a floating, black-and-white chādor. Throughout the film, Shideh fights a constant battle between society’s expectations of her as a woman and her own progressive individuality. The chādor taunts her by fluttering into her apartment and locking her out. The djinn tries to turn Dorsa against her mother. And, when both mother and daughter become trapped in the bomb shelter, they are overwhelmed by the smothering, suffocating fabric; Shideh must rip through it in order for them to escape, and even then it still tries to consume her.

As there is no escape in Tehran from the anxieties of war, so too is there no escape from the stifling expectations of female behavior and image in Islamic society, embodied in this fluttering piece of fabric.

The suffocating grip of society and the existential turmoil of war hang over all of their heads. Shideh feels inadequate to protect herself or her family from either force. Babak Anvari crafts his supernatural horror out of these emotions and themes, which makes Under the Shadow extraordinarily compelling in spite of its fairly slow burn.

Once Shideh and her daughter are “marked” by the djinn, they will always be haunted by them… just like they will never escape the anxiety and fear caused by the traumas inflicted by society and war.