“The Seed of the Sacred Fig” Is a Shattering Epic of Reproach

The four central characters in “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” a gripping, superbly acted drama from the Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof, are introduced with an almost ceremonial deliberation. First up is Iman (Misagh Zare), a lawyer who has just been appointed to the high-risk position of investigating judge; armed with the news, and a handgun issued for his protection, he drives to a mosque and spends a few moments in prayer. (Is he thanking God or pleading for mercy?) A hushed solemnity persists later at home, where Iman discusses matters with his wife, Najmeh (Soheila Golestani), in conspiratorial whispers. In the morning, we meet their daughters, Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami), a sensitive twenty-one-year-old, and Sana (Setareh Maleki), a mischievous, sharp-witted teen-ager; at last, Najmeh says cryptically, the two of them will no longer have to share a bedroom. Only later that day do we see all four family members together, at a restaurant, where Iman shares the ostensibly good news in full.

Rasoulof doesn’t just lay out a premise in these early scenes; he presents the family as a rigidly hierarchical and compartmentalized unit. Iman, walled off by work, is a largely absent authoritarian; Najmeh nervously acts as a conduit, passing along vague information from husband to children. As for Rezvan and Sana, their wary glances signal their growing exasperation with their parents’ rules, which are only about to intensify. Given the dangers of Iman’s new position, the girls must take special care not to harm his reputation, which means minding who they hang out with, abiding by the hijab laws, and keeping low social-media profiles. Their mother warns, “You must be irreproachable.”

With “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” Rasoulof has composed an epic of reproach. Iman’s promotion coincides with the Woman, Life, Freedom movement that ignited in 2022, after Mahsa Amini, a twenty-two-year-old Iranian Kurdish woman, was arrested for allegedly violating the hijab laws and died in the custody of Iran’s morality police. As Rezvan and Sana watch events unfold on their phones and the news, Rasoulof makes their horror ours; he splices in actual footage from the protests, including acts of extreme police brutality. Before long, the political will become acutely personal. Rezvan’s close friend Sadaf (Niousha Akhshi) is seriously injured by police at a university rally, and the two sisters bravely try to help her. Iman, meanwhile, is tormented in his new job, which requires him to hastily process countless new arrest cases by the day.

Rasoulof’s script might well have included a scene or two showing Iman’s dirty work in action, rather than consigning his moral dilemma to perhaps one too many soul-searching showers. Even so, the director is shrewd to zero in on the family home—a psychological war zone where secrets fester behind locked doors and nearly every room becomes a hiding place. The presence of a gun explicitly marks “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” as a domestic thriller—a nuclear-family noir. But even without a single weapon, I suspect, Rasoulof’s twisty tale would suck us in. The storm brewing in the streets finds an equivalent fury indoors, where Rezvan and Sana—and, in her own way, Najmeh—begin mounting their own acts of rebellion.

When I first saw “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, I broke down weeping at a scene in which Najmeh ministers, tenderly, to Rezvan’s wounded friend. She doesn’t much like Sadaf, whom she considers a bad influence, but under these agonizing circumstances the imperatives of basic human decency win out. Rasoulof doesn’t pretend that a single good deed will necessarily change someone’s world view; if anything, the trauma that Najmeh witnesses only hardens her disdain for political protest. The more resonant point is that this woman’s compassion—laid bare in unflinching closeup, as Najmeh tweezes buckshot from Sadaf’s face—carries its own unignorable moral weight. Her decency will not be forgotten, least of all by those of us watching.

Mine weren’t the only tears shed at that Cannes première; for some, the crying began before the movie did. Watching Rasoulof ascend the festival’s red-carpeted steps, it was surreal to recall that he had been on the run a mere two weeks earlier, having fled his country to avoid an eight-year prison sentence. The story of his daring escape, which he shared with the New York Times, is gripping enough to furnish a thriller on its own, though any proper account would begin years earlier, when Rasoulof became one of Iran’s most significant dissident filmmakers, with fiercely confrontational dramas like “Manuscripts Don’t Burn” (2013) and “A Man of Integrity” (2017). Throughout his career, he has repeatedly been arrested and banned from filmmaking. “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” like his previous feature, “There Is No Evil” (2020), was shot clandestinely.

Given the onscreen evidence, a corrosive tale of secrets and lies can only have benefitted from being made under such covert, intensely pressurized circumstances. There’s an extraordinary release of tension when, late into the story, Rasoulof springs his characters from their claustrophobic home environs and sends them, led by Iman, to a remote hideaway in the mountains. What ensues is a series of astonishments—a flexing of muscles not often associated with our too-sedate conceptions of Iranian auteur cinema. There is a car chase, an on-camera interrogation, a betrayal of astounding cruelty, and, finally—in a labyrinthine climax that brings classic Westerns to mind—a tragic turning of the tables.

Do the blunt-force closing passages stretch credulity? Perhaps so, though I think Rasoulof means for us to feel the strain—and to push past it, into a realm somewhere between realism, genre, and allegory. The family in this story can be read, on one level, as a middle-class Iranian microcosm, in which the conflicts that arise between generations, or genders, are very much matters of life and death. Beneath Rasoulof’s blistering rage erupts a wellspring of empathy: for young women, like Rezvan and Sana, fighting to be heard, and for wives and mothers, like Najmeh, participating in their own oppression. Empathy, too, for husbands and fathers like Iman, sacrificing their families on the altar of an unjust regime; the unyielding grip of the patriarchy is their tragedy, too. ♦