By M. Faust

As a title, presumably intended to provide some idea of the content of the work to which it is attached, The Seed of the Sacred Fig is somewhat less useful than, say, Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman. 

The sacred fig — Ficus religiosa — thrives by wrapping itself around another tree and eventually killing it. For writer-director Mohammad Rasoulof, who conceived of this film while serving a prison sentence (not his first) for criticizing the Iranian government, it is a symbol of the theocratic regime that is strangling his country.

After he was released he made this film in secret, smuggling the footage out of the country to be edited in Germany. Like so many other great filmmakers born in Iran—Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Asghar Farhadi, just to name the most famous — he was forced to flee to Europe. 

Winner of the Special Jury Prize at Cannes and an Oscar nominee for Best International Feature, The Seed of the Sacred Fig takes place in 2022, beginning just before the brutal killing of Mahsa Amini by Iran’s morality police for wearing her hijab improperly.

The film centers on Iman (Missagh Zare), a lawyer who has just been promoted to the position of investigating judge on the Revolutionary Court in Tehran. His job is to investigate accusations and give recommendations to the actual judges who will pass sentence. A devout man with a strong sense of duty, he takes pride in his promotion until he realizes that he is not expected to do any actual work: the Court simply wants him to rubber stamp accusations of religious impropriety, in cases that often carry a death sentence 

Neither his wife Najmeh (Soheila Golestani) nor his teenaged daughters Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki) know what Iman does for a living, and he is expected to be even more secretive with his new job. Because of the possibility of threats against his life, he is given a gun to use for self-protection. Believing his work to be just, Iman tells his family about it in order to explain why they will soon be enjoying better living conditions. 

His daughters aren’t particularly political, but when a friend is shot in the face while caught in a student protest, they begin to look at things in a different light. (As you will recall, at least 20,000 protestors were arrested and 500 killed as the government dug in its heels, claiming that Mahsa Amini died of a heart attack or a brain tumor.) Already tortured by self-doubt at the value of his work, Iman refuses to accept their arguments, claiming that they are falling victim to lies spread by the country’s “enemies.” 

The theme of a just person grappling with evidence that their most deeply held beliefs are based on lies is a powerful one that has often inspired filmmakers. (Two examples off the top of my head: The China Syndrome (1979) and Missing (1982), both starring Jack Lemmon.) It certainly has enormous relevance to our country today, in a way that Rasoulof probably wasn’t intending to address when he devised this film. 

Sadly, The Seed of the Sacred Fig (which had its local premiere last fall at the Buffalo International Film Festival) goes awry in its final act as it becomes a horror movie pitting a berserk father against his wife and daughters. This is particularly a problem given that the movie at 168 minutes is overlong, and the last third of it simply beats us over the head with characters that become stand-ins for political positions. 

It is playing at the Regal Walden Galleria.

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As long as it is, Sacred Fig is 45 minutes shorter than The Brutalist, which clocks in at over three and one half hours.

After the screening that I attended, another viewer asked me if I had enjoyed the movie. I thought about it for a moment and responded, “Well, I enjoyed watching it.” Which of course is not the same thing.

Even at its excessive length, Brady Corbet’s multi-Oscar nominated epic held my attention for its visuals, its music and sound design. But by the time it was over, my overall reaction was, “Huh”?

A plot synopsis on Wikipedia reveals many things that were not at all clear to me when I was watching the film. Whether that’s due to my inattention or sloppy filmmaking is a question I could only answer by watching the movie again, which I can’t say is high on my list of things to do this week. 

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I generally avoid horror movies these days, but I made an exception for Presence because it was directed by Steven Soderbergh, who tends to do interesting work even with his most commercial projects.

I presume what drew him to this haunted house drama written by David Koepp was the fact that it takes place from the point of view of the ghost trapped in a New Jersey house; Soderbergh generally does his own cinematography, so a project like this gives him a chance to experiment with lightweight digital cameras.

But a big problem with those cameras is that they distort when doing any kind of circular pan, something that happens often when shooting in a cramped location. It does not reproduce the vision of a human eye and thus continually calls attention to itself—you’re more conscious of how the camera is moving than what it is showing.

Nor does it help that the screenplay is weak, with many head-scratching elements and interpersonal issues among the family that moves into the house that distract from the thin main story.