What are the foundations of an oppressive regime? Paranoia, complicity, fear. Whether you’re on the side of the oppressor or the oppressed, those three factors are always present. Mohammad Rasoulof’s latest film, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, captures the wide swath and puts it into the story of a single family. Iman (Missagh Zareh) works for the revolutionary court in Tehran as an investigator, and gets promoted to being an investigative judge. The new job comes with a better salary and a more secure home. But he quickly learns that he wasn’t promoted for his professional know-how but for his willingness to follow orders – even when those orders go against the protocol he so rigidly follows. As protests rage in the streets and on campuses, the court wants to squash any semblance of disobedience, and it’s now Iman’s job to enforce the court’s might.

It’s important to note here that Iman immediately clocks that what he’s asked to do – lay down guilty verdicts before he’s even given a chance to review the evidence – is wrong. He says so explicitly and when he speaks with a colleague, it’s laid out to him simply: this is what the job is; if you want the perks, you follow the orders from the prosecutor. For this reason, judges and investigators keep their identities anonymous. They can’t even tell their families what they do. After the promotion, Iman is given a gun. The gun is more than just a Chekhov-ian narrative device, it’s a symbol for Iman’s place in his community and in his family. Deliberate, lethal, unpredictable. He shows the gun to his wife, Najmeh (Soheila Golestani), who immediately bristles at the sight of it, but she quickly resigns to her husband – a common occurrence in their household.

The candid conversations that Iman and Najmeh have in their bedroom differ greatly from the ones they have with their two daughters, the college-aged Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and the grade schooler Sana (Setareh Maleki). The two girls have friends very much involved in the raucous protests, and the videos they see on social media only harden their belief that the revolutionary court is morally wrong. In private, Iman and Najmeh basically espouse the same feelings with each other, but their staunch allegiance to the regime doesn’t allow them to tolerate their daughters’ rebellious attitudes. This dichotomy is the central conflict within Sacred Fig. Iman can recognize that he is being pressured and exploited, and it haunts him. But his level of obedience is so great that he allows his soul to perish in the process.

There are two major events that occur in the film. The first is Rezvan’s close friend, Sadaf (Niousha Akhshi), getting severely injured by police after getting too close to a protest. Rezvan was with her and can attest that Sadaf did not provoke the violence, and witnessing this further intensifies her distrust of the regime. Secondly, Iman finds his gun missing one morning. Losing your gun can mean jail time for an investigative judge, and with protesters gaining more and more momentum, Iman’s paranoia is already reaching high peak. He and Najmeh question their daughters, who deny taking it – they didn’t even know that he had a gun to begin with. The situation turns their family tension into an explosive standoff, leading Rasoulof’s film into thriller territory in the third act.

The promotion is meant to be good news for Iman, a rubber-stamped entry into the Upper Middle Class, but it poisons him from the inside. Kept up at night with the existential fear of convicting innocent individuals, he’s still so frozen by fear and fealty that he’s never brought to confront his own complicity in the violence that explodes across the city. The wall-to-wall propaganda and soft promises of personal prosperity alter his mind, wither his paternal instincts, and intensify his paranoia. His identity as a judge is a well-guarded secret but should it ever reveal itself, he will be held at the mercy of ravenous protestors who wish to shame anyone participating in the violence against its protesting citizenry. Frequently, Rasoulof edits in cell phone footage from the actual protests that erupted across Tehran in 2022 and 2023. Some of the images are quite violent indeed, but it’s telling that it’s the regime that often perpetrates it, not the protestors.

Rasoulof’s script is masterfully written, his characters perfectly calibrated. Iman is the good soldier attempting to tame the anger of his daughters. The wild card is Najmeh, a pious, devoted wife who wishes more than anything to keep her family safe and her husband’s reputation intact. That those two things become at odds with one another makes up her central conflict. She sympathizes with her daughters more than she allows herself to show, arguing with them constantly. Najmeh preaches conservative tradition while Rezvan and Sana explode in self-righteous rage. The creeping skepticism hits Najmeh differently than Iman. When things get really get hot and heavy, she defaults toward protecting her daughters and he defaults toward protecting himself. That conflict reflects the issues at large, in a society that values men much higher than the women.

Rasoulof’s criticism of the regime’s hypocrisy and corruption has caused him grief in his own life. Like other Iranian filmmakers (Jafar Panahi and Asghar Farhadi, for example), he’s been arrested for breaking censorship laws as his movies seldom portray Iranian authorities in a complementary light. He has since fled Iran to escape an eight-year prison sentence, which has allowed him to travel to festivals in support of Sacred Fig throughout 2024. The ongoing and tense relationship that Iran has with its filmmakers puts the country at odds with the international community that often prizes these films, and it adds another layer of intrigue to this movie, as it pulls no punches in its disapproval in an institution that leads by harsh force.

In it’s final act, The Seed of the Sacred Fig has a chase sequence that recalls the famous finale in Orson Welles’s The Lady From Shanghai, both in its visual inventiveness and its narrative tautness. By this time, the family’s stability has become completely undone and loyalties are abandoned. It’s Najmeh, and Golestani’s incredible performance of her, that becomes the central figure. Whether she comes to appreciate her daughters’ point-of-view or whether she succumbs once again to Iman’s tyrannical methods becomes what the story hinges on. At nearly three hours, the story is equal parts ruminative and high octane, character-based and action-oriented. The real-life footage of police violence should feel familiar to any American viewers, though the severity of the violence is still enough to be shocking. It creates an immediacy that speaks toward several hostilities currently raging around the world. That it does this while still feeling like a local drama about a family is evidence of how deftly this story is told and how superbly Rasoulof executes it.

 

Written and Directed by Mohammad Rasoulof