‘The Seed of the Sacred Fig’ movie review: Mohammad Rasoulof’s study in asphyxiation is a masterpiece

The Seed of the Sacred Fig: Mohammad Rasoulof's anti-authoritarian treatise defies categorization, a searing indictment of Iran's theocracy.

The best art often blooms from the darkest soil, and with The Seed of the Sacred Fig, Mohammad Rasoulof has planted his anti-authoritarian treatise, deep and unshakable. Filmed clandestinely, smuggled across borders and screened at Cannes against the explicit wishes of the smothering constraints of Iran’s theocracy, the filmmaker’s latest work feels true to its name as an intricate, thorny organism that tightens its grip as it grows. The film itself defies categorisation — part domestic drama, part political disquisition, and even a horror movie at times. But above all, it’s a searing indictment of the machinery designed to crush the defiant spirit of Iranian women.

Set in Tehran during the explosive Woman, Life, Freedom protests against the custodial killing of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, in 2022, the story follows Iman (Misagh Zareh), a newly appointed judge in Iran’s Revolutionary Court. On paper, it’s a promotion — better pay, a bigger apartment, and a shiny new (Chekovian) gun for “protection.” In reality, it’s an initiation into the machinery of the state, where death sentences are handed out like parking tickets and dissent is extinguished sans debate. But more than just the regime’s puppet wielding his power with an air of self-righteous piety; Iman is also a father and a husband, slowly coming apart at the seams.

His wife, Najmeh (Soheila Golestani), is dutiful to the point of subservience, while their daughters, Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki), chafe against the stifling boundaries imposed by their father and, by extension, the state. The script renders these familial tensions with both specificity and universality, drawing them with a deliberate precision that mirrors the larger tensions outside their apartment walls: the silencing, the surveillance, and the slow erasure of autonomy.

Iman’s world starts to crack when the aforementioned state-issued gun disappears. He’s sure someone in his family took it — after all, his teenage daughters have been glued to Instagram protest videos making rebellious noises about the hijab. Najmeh warns him that the girls are getting “too bold,” but Iman is sure his authority as a patriarch will keep them in check. Once the gun vanishes, his confidence begins to unravel.

A descent into chaos follows, though Rasoulof doesn’t rush the fall. The family’s small, claustrophobic apartment, becomes a tense pressure cooker as Iman’s paranoia infects everyone and everything. He resorts to interrogating his own family with the same cold detachment he reserves for the dissidents who pass through his courtroom. Blindfolded, they sit across from demands for the truth, not as their father but as their judge.

In one of the film’s most wrenching moments, Najmeh removes buckshot from the face of Sadaf, a young protester brutalized by the police, hiding in their home. The scene is agonisingly detailed, the camera lingering on her bloodied face as Najmeh works in silence. It’s her first small act of rebellion, this kindness, but it feels monumental. And yet, this compassion doesn’t feel romanticised or transform her into a hero, nor does it change the system or stop the violence. It just is — a fragile, fleeting moment of (sacrilegious) humanity. Later, when the veil of lies lifts and Najmeh finally snaps, her soft, vacillating rebellion is seismic.

Pooyan Aghababaei’s cinematography is gentle but menacingly effective. The apartment’s dim corners and the dingy, foreboding corridors of the courtrooms are captured in suffocating proximity with its characters and their crumbling world. Meanwhile, the use of jarring real protest footage pits the roaring defiance of faceless crowds against the suffocating implosions of this single family’s private rebellion.