Under the shadow
For fuck's sake, stop cargo-culting Syd Field, people.
If you are making a low-budget movie, there are three fundamental things to keep in mind:
- Keep your perspective tight,
- Make it uniquely yours,
- Less is more, so don't waste time with special effects,
These apply to any movie and any genre, but the more formulaic the genre tends to be (cough horror cough), the more having your own style counts. If your budget is tight and you don't have much production time, every choice you default to your genre's known tropes is a time you invite unfavorable comparisons. Speaking with a unique voice is fundamental.
The rest is laziness and habit.
Under the Shadow comes close. It's got a good grasp of technical basics, a unique setting – Tehran in the 1980s – and under-used mythology.
But it pays more attention to Field's structure than to its unique ingredients. It blindly follows a recipe, MacDonalizes its product instead of trying to cook a local dish with them. If Field's recipe isn't telling it how to use an item, well, let's chuck it into the pot with the rest. Blend them all, let structure sort them out.
Close is not good enough. Entertainment has been commoditized – there are more choices than time. You have to bring something to the table other than your autochthonous nature.
Shideh is a former medical student and home-bound mother. We first see her wrapped in a chador, sitting in a bureaucrat's office. She's a demure little thing, pleading to be let back into the college she's been banned from, unsure of her crime's specifics.
She used to be an activist during the revolution before finishing her studies. Iranian society does not look kindly on her independent thinking. The bureaucrat tells her, with a callous delivery, she is never going to study again. She should have kept her mouth shut and behaved.
We soon see Shideh back home, where it turns out she's neither demure nor eager to conform. She dresses in Western clothes. Her family owns a VCR, which she uses for Jane Fonda exercise tapes and so her daughter Dorsa can re-watch cartoons they can't get on TV. She fumes at what she perceives as her husband's lack of support, his unstated desire that she settled for being a housewife instead of bashing her head against society's walls.
And the city's under siege from Saddam Hussein's Iraq, which was bombing and launching rockets against Iran's major cities.
Things were stressful even before the spirit arrived, which it does almost on cue at the 30-minute mark.
I keep having to bring this up. Too many scripts adhere to Syd Field's formula, treat it as blanks to fill in.
Field proposed that a movie should be split in three acts.
Act I is the set up, and on a regular 1'40” movie, it usually lasts half an hour. It has a plot point just at the end of its allotted time, a clash of cymbals to jolt your audience awake.
Act II is the confrontation. It's twice as long as Act I, so on our hypothetical movie it would last one hour. But that's too long to trust your audience's attention span, so you're going to need plot points at the 60- and 90-minute marks.
Act III is the resolution. It's just dénouement, some 10 or 15 minutes helping you come down from the big explosion that you got 90 minutes in.
Credits roll. Everyone goes home happy. The end.
Everyone but those who have learned to spot this pattern, because once you see it, you can't unsee it. You get a big moment, check your watch, tick the act as done, and know you have half an hour to kill until the next one.
Not knowing how to keep people's attention, writers settle for Syd Field's structure. They hide their personality as they let Field tell them how to act and talk and walk.
And Under the Shadow has Syd-Fielded itself into blandness.
If you feel I've spent too long on the introduction above, you have no idea how long the first half-hour of the movie feels. It sleepwalks until the requisite pivot, where it jolts awake for a moment, then it falls asleep again. It dribbles mythology, here and there, to pass the time.
By all rights, it should be singular.
Shideh feels alone, lacking support from her husband and her husband's family, and she finds herself in increasing physical isolation as everyone flees the city because of the Iraqi bombings. The windows are taped, in anticipation of an inevitable explosion. When the supernatural threat shows up, the first sign is a widening crack in their apartment ceiling, the external world trying to creep into their Westernized bubble. The djinn then manifests to Shideh as a floating chador, a visualization of the pious uniformity Iranian society wants to jam her into.
The ingredients are all there.
But these problems arrive on cue, and the movie doesn't know what to fill its time with. The script wastes opportunities and gets burdened by a late-movie focus on special effects that they can't afford.
When the spirit appears, Shideh sees it as cloak that moves as carried by the wind. Or it should. It appears to move with that plasticky fluency of CGI that not even the grainiest post-processing can help hide. It breaks the illusion, even more when you contrast it with the one moment of the movie where they use an actual cloth.
In It Follows, the main special effect is the casting. David Robert Mitchell aims to unsettle, so we don't get deformed beasts or glowing eyes. We get people. Odd, perturbed-looking people who may or may not be there. The lack of a “tell” on their appearance and the lack of that special-effect shimmer increase tension, as we never know who around the characters might be a threat.
Worse is how Under the Shadow squanders the opportunity provided by the setting. Shideh is besieged by the Iraqis, cornered and coerced by her countrymen, nudged into submission by her husband. Neighbors condemn her non-conformism with their stares until they need her medical expertise. She has a history of sleepwalking when stressed. Then her husband gets sent to the front lines.
On a better movie, we'd spend most of it wonder if the djinn's actions are all in her head. It could be disturbing as an Iranian The Babadook. If the script didn't take that away from us by declaring her sane, because Dorsa sees the djinn as well, and her observations match Shideh's. There's never a question that Dorsa might just be playing along, humoring her mother. The child knows what's going on before the mother admits it herself.
You don't give a protagonist who we might think is crazy an anchoring point like that. Resolving ambiguity that early only removes a source of suspense, and you could use a few of those.
Under the Shadow doesn't get going until it's too late. The mood-setting is fine when they get around to it, but by then, it's spent too long contorting itself into the structure corset someone thought they were supposed to wear. At least there's no jump scare at the end, just a wind reminding you that things aren't over.
Shideh is a nonconformist trying to survive in a society that tries to hammer her into a hole she hates. Under the Shadow, too much of a conformist itself gleefully bends itself into the shape of the hole it thinks it's expected to fit.
Originally published on my old blog
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