The Seed of the Sacred Fig: Mohammad Rasoulof’s domestic thriller is an elegant warning to the Iranian regime

• Reviewed from the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. 

For many, the droll, often elliptical films of Jafar Panahi emerged as defining works about Iran under theocratic tyranny, but the latest from Panahi’s fellow survivor of persecution, Mohammad Rasoulof, shows the equal power of the starker drama in its story of division and complicity within the country’s privileged classes. Premiering dramatically in Cannes with Rasoulof freshly escaped from his country, The Seed of the Sacred Fig wrenchingly pits an investigating judge and his wife against their two dissenting daughters, who are appalled by brutal crackdowns on protesters.

The parents and teenagers essentially inhabit different worlds that only overlap in their Tehran apartment, the primary setting of the film’s first half. Iman (Misagh Zare), the respectable-looking father, is rising in the ranks of the state judicial department, doing increasingly repressive work that we never see; his wife, Najmeh (Soheila Golestani), dotes upon him, and they savour the prospect of a bigger apartment and other rewards for his loyal service. But their daughters, university-age Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and younger Sana (Setareh Maleki), stay glued to social media videos of government attacks on protesters, shown repeatedly in harrowing clips in mobile phone-vertical shots.

Theirs is still a loving family, with warm memories; in one cosy scene, Mum and her girls groom and chat. But they’re primed for a generational clash, and the mounting dissonance between the young women’s democratic views and the parents’ hold-the-line conservatism becomes a microcosm of the archaic authoritarian regime ignoring its citizens’ will to be free. Rezvan and Sana are finally drawn directly into the turmoil of the latest protests when Rezvan’s friend, Sadaf (Niousha Akhshi), is wounded by a buckshot, and they smuggle her into the apartment for her safety.

In a simpler film, the attack on Sadaf would be the polemical centrepiece: she’s shown in lingering close-up, realistically gory with her eye swollen shut – the face of an innocent victim of violence that any supporter of the regime is condoning. But an equally strong moment comes when Rezvan confronts her father at the dinner table and says, baldly, he’s wrong, and too close to the problem to see it; at the film’s premiere screening, these exchanges sparked applause. “Normal people who want a normal life and freedom” is, in Rezvan’s words, at the root of the protests, not some conspiracy of ill-defined “enemies” that her father flimsily maintains. The teenage rebellion of the moment (which is not without humour) and Rostami’s reasonable tone and timing steer the scene clear of didactic showboating.

Accusations fly back and forth between the daughters and their protective mother, who’d rather that her children had never socialised with the likes of Sadaf but still asks a friend with a high-placed husband to ascertain Sadaf’s whereabouts in custody later. Throughout, Rasoulof is plumbing the individual moral decisions faced by citizens under this regime much as he did in There Is No Evil (2020) and its four stories circling capital punishment. But Sacred Fig proceeds to bust out of the confines of their domestic drama – which is surefootedly staged and fleshed out with telling gestures and glances – with eye-opening developments that express the paranoia engendered by the patriarchal regime and its corrosive effects. 

These genre-inflected turns include questioning of the girls by a friend of the family who works as an interrogator. It’s a creepy sequence that shows Rasoulof’s willingness to break out some severe imagery: Rezvan sits blindfolded against a bare wall, in an unsettlingly bare composition that gives the subjugation of citizen to state a pure, unforgiving shape. There follow some wildly unexpected action-drama flourishes (maybe foreshadowed by the movie’s mysterious opening, in which Iman drives through the night on a mission never fully explained, wielding a gun). Far from entertainment value, these sequences suggest the violent prerogatives Iman assumes as a father and controlling agent of the state when push comes to shove.

“Over there we will become the family we were,” Iman says at one point when explaining a move to the countryside where he grew up. The tortuous phrasing is a concise statement of conservative purpose: family and state returning to some imagined prior perfect form. It’s no wonder that Rasoulof opted to flee the country upon learning that authorities were onto his film production and would soon carry out his pending sentence of imprisonment and flogging. But his film deserves to be regarded on its own terms, as an eloquent record of and warning to a regime clinging to power at the expense of freedom.