“The Seed of the Sacred Fig” Review

There’s a discomforting realism to how director Mohammad Rasoulof stages this vicious critique of Iran’s political unrest. Rasoulof has experienced Iran’s most hideous censorship and faced so many critical charges that framing such a criticism of the country’s unjust political system was one of secrecy. At great risk to his freedom, The Seed of the Sacred Fig was a film worth making for its scathing dissection of Iran’s theocracy and the fury that brewed within its recent protests.

The title itself came from the process of a specific fig that proliferates through strangling another tree. It’s a perfect representation of how a theocracy ultimately erodes from within. That’s the approach to how the film frames the family of Iman (Missagh Zareh), a prosecutor in Tehran. Having been promoted to the Revolutionary Court, Iman now has a higher salary but greater security risk, granting him a gun. This makes his wife, Najmeh (Soheila Golestani), cautiously optimistic of her husband’s rise to success. While Iman will make more money, he’ll also have to rule on cases where protestors are sentenced to death with little evidence. Such a position will warrant death threats, leading to the couple confessing this issue to their teenage daughters, Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki). But work and home don’t stay apart as the daughters experience the worst protests amid their schools and city, where it becomes impossible not to question their father’s work.

As political unrest mounts in Tehran, all it takes is something simple to throw this family into a fury of paranoia and hatred. That lynchpin comes in the form of Iman’s missing gun. He had shown this tool of the trade to his wife but not his daughters. So, when the weapon is missing, he naturally accuses his questioning offspring of such a theft. Even Najmeh condemns the girls, but more out of devotion to her husband. All of this anxiety, however, is less related to the connections of the family and more about subservience to the state. Every uncertainty and deception brews from the fear that you will be prosecuted for not being good enough or faithful to what has been built. This boils up some heated conversation in the household, where the daughters will bite back about how this government is not protecting them while their weary father can offer half-thought talking points he’s been fed throughout his life.

The tackling of the topical makes this film feel so engrossing for what it dares to approach from the perspective of those who benefit from keeping their heads down. Compared to the poor of Tehran, this family would be just fine if they never questioned the brutality and protests that were spilling into their streets. But they can’t. It is ever-present in their lives. It makes every household conversation an awkward one. The daughters want to talk to their mother about how unjust the state is, but this is a wife who has grown up accepting everything the state does without question. She scoffs at all the arguing young women who don’t want to be beaten in the streets for not being dressed accordingly. Iman goes from being passively weary about his hideous daily duties to becoming aggressively violent when his authority is questioned, and his assertions of god are not reflected in the women of his family.

The film works best when it lets the political unrest bubble. I don’t think the fourth act is as compelling where the tension mounts so that it becomes less of a domestic political thriller and more of a chase thriller. The thrills of the final few minutes don’t diminish the political implications of the social critique throughout most of the film, but it does seem to reduce the anxiety to a primal platitude that resolves itself in a mixed manner. That said, the progression of the film remains politically on point for showcasing how the adherence to a theocracy will ultimately damn even the most devoted.

The Seed of the Sacred Fig touches on a universal fear of a state beholden to something as absurd as religious doctrine. The problems of Tehran are not unique to that region. We are constantly seeing countries across the globe cave to the far-right pressures of fascism, serving an archaic depiction of god than any of the wills of the people. You should not be watching this film and think, “Wow, thank goodness I don’t live in Tehran.” You should be witnessing a brewing bile within the hearts of men that only festers, consumes, and destroys when oligarchs rule that it is okay to be cruel as god wills it so. That type of mindset is damaging not just to the unfortunate but also to the zealots who follow such foolish beliefs. Theocracies brutalize everybody, from the dissenters to the devout, and Mohammad Rasoulof’s film makes that statement the strongest in how the family erodes amid such a brittle government structure.