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

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 still from ‘The Seed of the Sacred Fig’
| Photo Credit:
Neon

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.

A still from ‘The Seed of the Sacred Fig’
| Photo Credit:
Neon

It’s tempting to read the film as a direct reflection of Rasoulof’s own struggles. The Iranian filmmaker, who has spent much of the last decade dodging prison sentences and government bans, knows better than most what it means to live under constant surveillance. Still, there is a certain irony to Rasoulof’s approach. While contemporaries like Jafar Panahi often turn the camera on themselves to craft meta-narratives that obscure their art and activism, Rasoulof chooses to focus on the very people who have made his life hell. Iman’s rigid adherence to the rules and his blind faith in the system is a manifestation of the regime itself — a man whose soul has been so thoroughly strangled by the sacred fig that he no longer realises he is complicit in his own destruction.

Of course, the allegory is all but subtle. The titular parasitic tree that strangles its host from the inside is a blunt but effective metaphor for Iran’s theocracy. Like the tree, the regime wraps itself around its people, squeezing the life out of them under the guise of protection. Rasoulof’s direction is equally blunt, unapologetically furious, and, at times, veers on the edge of melodrama, but when reality is this cruel, subtlety feels almost dishonest.

By the time the film drags its shattered family into the final act, what’s left is a hollowed-out microcosm of a nation in free fall. And when the screen cuts to black, don’t expect a tidy resolution or a comforting afterthought. Rasoulof knows better than to offer catharsis when the fight is still raging. The sacred fig may choke the life out of its host, but it can’t kill what lies beneath — roots that resist, grow, and push back. And the exiled thorn in the side of Iran’s theocracy understands that all too well.

It’s almost laughable, if it weren’t so infuriating, that a film as blisteringly urgent and vital was relegated to the purgatory of a “Special” prize at Cannes, while its competitors stand the chance of nabbing Best Picture at the Oscars soon. Few films have emerged so inextricably tied to the oppressive soil from which they’ve been clawed, and yet here was Rasoulof’s masterpiece born of suffocation, playing honourary mention.

What does it mean to resist a system designed to crush you? What happens when the enforcers of that system begin to turn on their own? And, most importantly, how long can such a system survive before its roots finally give way? Rasoulof doesn’t have answers, but he doesn’t need to. He’s already planted the seed.

The Seed of the Sacred Fig is currently running in theatres.