At The Movies: The Seed Of The Sacred Fig a brave fable, Nightbitch has more bark than bite

The Seed Of The Sacred Fig (NC16)

168 minutes, opens exclusively at The Projector on Jan 30
★★★★☆

The story: Filmed in secrecy, Iranian dissident writer-director Mohammad Rasoulof’s 2024 Cannes Film Festival Special Jury Prize winner – and current Best International Feature Film Oscar nominee – charts the fissuring dynamics within the household of an investigating judge in Tehran during the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom revolution.

To be an investigating judge in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Court is to rubber-stamp the executions of dissenters, and Iman (Missagh Zareh), the paterfamilias in The Seed Of The Sacred Fig, is a busy man, signing several hundred death penalties a day.

The middle-aged civil servant’s promotion has coincided with the sweeping nationwide protests against the death of a university student under police custody for her loose hijab.

His fealty is to the regime, and his devout wife’s (Soheila Golestani) is to him. But their two daughters (Mahsa Rostami and Setareh Maleki) witness the female demonstrators being beaten and “disappear”, and are horrified by the authorities’ brutal crackdown.

Then Iman’s handgun goes missing from his bedside drawer. His suspicions fall on the three women amid an intensifying intergenerational conflict. Curtains and hijabs are the visual motifs for the suffocating veil of paranoia as the family unit plays out the state’s patriarchal theocratic repression.

Rasoulof’s tense domestic thriller is an anguished indictment of the Islamic Republic.

The personal is political, and the insertions of cellphone footage of the uprising merges the fictional narrative with grave reality, certainly for the film-maker. Already banned for his seditious works, including his 2020 Berlin Film Festival Golden Bear winner There Is No Evil, Rasoulof fled an eight-year prison sentence plus flogging on the eve of the movie’s premiere by trekking to Germany, where he and his actresses now live in exile.

Hot take: This brave parable speaks truth to power and is gripping in its entire three hours.

Nightbitch (M18)

Available on Disney+
★★★☆☆

The story: A New York artist (Amy Adams), who “pawsed” her career to be a frumpy stay-at-home mum, turns into a dog.

The mother of a two-year-old boy (twins Arleigh and Emmett Snowden) in the American black comedy Nightbitch remains unnamed because she no longer has an identity or a life of her own.

Her days are a childcare drudgery of shopping, feeding, bottom-wiping and Baby Book Club sing-alongs at the library.

She is exhausted and utterly alone.

So, when her obtuse husband (Scoot McNairy) returns on weekends from business and tells her “happiness is a choice”, it is enough to make her snap – and snarl, sprout fur and a tail and begin running on all fours with the neighbourhood canine pack.

This is about as barking mad as she gets. Which is not very.

It is perhaps unfair to be disappointed by how tame the metamorphosis is when American writer-director Marielle Heller (Can You Ever Forgive Me?, 2018; A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood, 2019) intends less a body horror than a metaphor for repressed anger.

Her adaptation of Rachel Yoder’s 2021 novel is a shaggy-dog allegory on parenting grievances that, most incongruously, ends as a sententious feminist screed on the power of childbirth.

But of course, pride and joy exist alongside frustration and resentment in the full spectrum of motherhood.

The role forms a bookend to star-producer Adams’ neglected pregnant housewife in Junebug (2005), which earned the American actress the first of her six Oscar nominations. And with empathy, she brings together the experience’s many contradictions into a relatable human whole.

Hot take: Adams is predictably good in her emotional honesty, even in a story meagre on the bones.