Mohammad Rasoulof's THE SEED OF THE SACRED FIG (2024)

SotSF is pretty great until near the end when the tension started to dissipate (or maybe it is because if you show a gun for that long, the anti-climax of it *not* going off should be earned and I am not convinced this did). 

Maybe it was seeing so many putting this in the top, top pantheon of the year's films; not only it's Oscar nomination, but the nature of how it was basically smuggled out of the country to be Screened at Cannes (itself a bold and inspiring story to get to where it found distribution for much of the world) brings an expectation, not to mention the run time. The fact that it is really really profound and strong in the ways that matter counts though, especially as a film about family dysfunction and how the roles they've been put into are disastrous.

I loved how the mother was not that sympathetic to the daughters early on, and yet there were more than a few wrinkles in what the filmmaker shows us of the distance between husnand and wife - all those nights where he comes home and she at first stays up but then falls asleep as he is out longer and longer (and to look back after the film is done at those scenes and to understand *why* he was out so long having "meetings" at work adds to the chilling nature of his response) - and that if it wasn't for this missing gun something else was going to break in this family some way. And this is a time period that is not some far off context but a society that is actively in religious oppression and armed to the teeth.

Some of the film is shot fairly standard, coverage being largely shot reverse shot and so forth for dialog, but what's impressive to me is when Rasoulof breaks from this, like when the girl's friend is at the house with the battered face and the mother takes time to pick out the pieces of weaponry from her wounds. That is the most upsetting part of the whole film if I take stock of it all, in how carefully she takes in picking out those pieces, and it's also from here that the mother Najmeh may not say it outright (and she still has a lot of motherly consternation for her daughters after this, especially in the "it'll upset your father" realm, Golestani is in like 6 dimensions with her performance), but she is changed and has to see things differently now. Or will she, is a key question.

It does lean more into a Genre/Thriller kind of story in the last half hour - almost like something out of the Shining if one were to say more like a Horror film (only our dad/husband just has his own maniacal paternal paranoia and self hatred to blame) - and that isn't quite as absorbing as just seeing this family at home. But we do need that moment where the two people following the family on the road confront the dad, for us to see just what extent they are at now in the story, and that it almost has to unravel from there with what the gun is really all about. And all of this with the immediate and harrowing backdrop of the protests and demonstrations of the period, it makes for an extremely satisfying film.