State of siege: "The Seed of the Sacred Fig"

Here are six words you don't see very often in a movie's opening credits: "This film was made in secret." Iranian cinema's elder statesman Jafar Panahi, who may still have goodwill banked somewhere for having helped to bring his country to the world's attention, has been granted some small measure of room to manoeuvre in his recent, largely clandestine endeavours. No such leeway has been extended to the next-gen writer-director Mohammad Rasoulof, who in the past fifteen years has been sentenced to prison time and flogging, and had his passport seized, by the Iranian authorities. His latest The Seed of the Sacred Fig, a Cannes 2024 prizewinner that finds itself up against the likes of Emilia Pérez and I'm Still Here for this year's Best International Feature Oscar, had to be directed remotely, lest Rasoulof be arrested - the exact situation Panahi dramatised in 2022's No Bears - though this curious circumstance only ever enhances our understanding of what the new film is really, deep down, about: entrapment. As we find him, protagonist Iman (Missagh Zareh, who handily resembles Bob Hoskins or an angry bear depending on where he is in the plot) is being handed first a promotion to the standing of investigating judge, then a loaded gun. On one hand, it's cause for celebration: wife Najmeh (Soheila Golestani) speculates they'll now be able to relocate to a three-bedroom property, liberating the couple's bunked-up college-age daughters Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki). On the other, there is cause for concern: the gun is to ward off anyone seeking retribution on the judge or his family. More bad news: when Iman reports to his office, he discovers his job is merely to sign off on those verdicts handed down to him by his superiors. (The "investigating" part of his job description, much like any trial, is solely for show.) And Iman has been absorbed so far inside the State that certain conditions now apply: his daughters, who've displayed troubling signs of modernity (nail polish, talk of hairdye, pals with progressive views), must now comport themselves accordingly. "It's a phase," Dad shrugs, insisting the imminent return to school will see the girls right. But rebellion is brewing, both within this house and on the streets outside.

It's not long before you spot just what a dangerous game Rasoulof is playing here. The wily Panahi set No Bears on the very fringes of Iranian society - close enough to the border to escape, should he have need - while ensuring that everything from title to narrative was left open to interpretation. (Though only the most blinkered of fools would fail to see where he was coming from.) Rasoulof, by contrast, is operating in the very heart of Tehran, clearly targeting his drama at those functionaries who may still have the odd flicker of conscience about the work they carry out for the regime on a daily basis. It's not just that Iman's actions tear the lives of others apart; they also tear his family apart, and finally ensure his own downfall, too. For any state to function like this, Rasoulof posits, its functionaries have either to sign off on tyranny or turn a blind eye to it. The Seed of the Sacred Fig isn't solely content to deploy dramatic licence, in this respect. Rasoulof also works in footage of the Iranian state's clampdown on actual protests: violent, bloody and shocking, these clips are shared surreptitiously by Rezvan and Sana on social media while their folks watch the official party line being parroted on the nightly news. Everything gets brought closer and closer to home: it's one thing for a dissident filmmaker to invent an entirely fictional scenario to illustrate the terrors of the State, quite another to cite actual names and cases, and then find the video evidence that backs your argument up. The whole endeavour could have seemed one-sided, a hectoring screed; instead, for much of its duration, Rasoulof's film pulls off that very Iranian trick of being so credibly naturalistic it becomes actively involving and then unexpectedly thrilling. Indeed, so completely are we caught up in The Seed of the Sacred Fig as a thriller that there are points we might start to forget the actual Revolutionary Guard could storm these locations at any moment and lead everyone away in shackles, like the police at the end of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Is that why Rasoulof's film has been trailered just about everywhere? I've seen the promo not just in the usual arthouses, but in my local multiplex ahead of Nosferatu, and in another multiplex before the Bollywood drama Sky Force (a tad ironic, given that film's intended audience of flag-waving statists). Lionsgate have clearly had ambitious plans for this acquisition, and if bookings have proven steady rather than stellar (the film itself has showed up at neither multiplex so far), that may owe less to any perceived shortfall in quality or commercial appeal than to a seasonally competitive marketplace (all these awards contenders to get through) and a tricky running time to schedule. The movie is long at two hours 47 minutes, but Rasoulof does something constructive with that length, pinning down the basic facts of the situation and then allowing himself to develop the drama at a realistic pace, adding telling, sometimes killer details, and fleshing these characters out beyond the social perspectives they each represent. Zareh's Iman isn't automatically a bad man - he's devout and conscientious, working all hours of the day (and increasingly late into the night as the protests mount) so as to keep a protective roof over his loved ones' heads; even at a late stage in the plot, within a house already vocally divided, he wistfully expresses a desire to hug and kiss the daughters who rile him so. But for a long while, he doesn't have to suffer the consequences of the regime's actions - of his own actions - in the same way his wife and children do. Similarly, Golestani's Najmeh initially strikes the Western eye as something of a trad wife, trying to hold the family together in the vain hope they might one day enjoy the benefits of her husband's promotion; yet she does care for her daughters, and her daughters' friends, and has her beliefs visibly rattled by what she sees and experiences. These feel like real, flesh-and-blood people, entering dire straits within the wider tight spot that is the Islamic Republic of Iran; even when they flee their home at a critical juncture, there is no easy escape.

Here, in its final movement, Rasoulof's film hits a stretch of rougher road, lurching so completely into conventional thriller territory - with high-speed car chases, life-or-death games of hide-and-seek and the hogtying of minor characters - that you may begin to wonder whether the burden of directing had been delegated to Renny Harlin instead. This closing act is steadied to some degree by the performers, no matter that at least one of them now seems to be playing a markedly different character, and even here Rasoulof alights upon fascinating, resonant ideas. (Not least sending everybody on screen back in time as some mullahs would presumably like, first into a storeroom filled to the rafters with forbidden pre-Revolutionary material, then a dusty network of disinterred palaces and caves.) Yet I started to long for a bit more of Panahi's cool control: it feels vaguely perverse that this production should start getting panicky as it leaves Tehran in its rear-view mirror (you find yourself wondering: did somebody's cover get blown?), and you can hear Rasoulof cranking up the volume - literally so, at one point - so as to ensure his message will reach Western ears. The film is really good, perhaps even the strongest of all this year's Oscar nominees, then merely very good, but it's always impressively brave: written and directed within rigorously policed enemy territory, acted to the hilt by performers who had to have realised the full implications of what they were playing. (Even the make-up artists, called into action for a sequence more viscerally affecting than anything in the ever-more-silly-seeming The Substance, could surely have found themselves being carted away and accused of treachery.) It's never much of an escape from real-world 2025, granted, but throughout we sense the possibility of tyranny everywhere we look - in large part because Rasoulof knows firsthand how it creeps into our heads, our homes and our hearts. One of the most important functions of any camera - now more than ever? - is bearing witness. However they were moved into these positions, from wherever the cry of "action" went up, Rasoulof's cameras did that with a gravity and urgency you hope even a hardline investigating judge could come to admire - even if only in secret. 

The Seed of the Sacred Fig is now playing in selected cinemas.