‘The Seed of the Sacred Fig’ Review: Mohammed Rasolof’s Study in Asphyxiation is a Masterpiece

The best art often blooms from deep soil, and with sacred fig seed, Mohammed Rasolof has planted his anti-authority texts, deep and unmistakable. Filmed, smuggled across borders, and in Cannes against the apparent wishes of Iran’s smothering barriers to democracy, the filmmaker’s latest work feels true to its name as a complex, thorny creature that tightens its grip as if that it grows. The film itself defies classification – part domestic drama, part political disintegration, and even a horror film at times. But above all, it is a brilliant indictment of the machinery designed to crush the defiant spirit of Iranian women.

Set in Tehran during explosives woman, life, freedom Set in 2022, protesting against the custodial murder of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, the story follows Iman (Msigh Zareh), a newly minted 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 is an initiation into the machinery of the state, where death sentences are handed out like parking tickets and debate is extinguished by dissent. but more than a mere puppet of the regime, exaggerating its power with an air of self-righteous sanctity; Iman is also a father and a husband, slowly coming apart at the seams.

His wife, Najmeh (Sohila Golestani), is dutiful to the point of subservience, while his daughters, Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Sena Maleki), rail against the stifling limitations imposed by their father and, by extension, the state. The script presents these familial tensions with both specificity and universality, drawing them with a deliberate precision that mirrors larger tensions outside the walls of their apartment: silencing, surveillance, and the slow erosion of autonomy.

Iman’s world begins to crack when the aforementioned state-issued gun goes missing. She’s sure someone in her family took it — after all, her teenage daughters are glued to Instagram protest videos making rebellious noises about the hijab. Najmah warns her that the girls are being “too bold”, but Iman is confident that her authority as a patriarch will keep them in check. Once the gun disappears, his confidence begins to unravel.

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

A descent into chaos follows, although Rasoloff does not participate in 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 before the demands of truth, not as their father but as their judge.

In one of the film’s most haunting moments, Najmeh removes the buckle from the face of Sadaf, a young protester brutalized by the police, hiding in her home. The scene is agonizing, 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 romantic or turn him into a hero, nor does it change the system or stop the violence. It just is – a delicate, fleeting moment of (sacred) humanity. Later, when the veil of lies lifts and Najmeh finally blinks, her soft, vacillating rebellion is seismic.

Pooyan Aghababaei’s cinematography is gentle but menacingly effective. The dim corners of the apartment and the dingy, foreboding corridors of the courtroom are captured in suffocating intimacy with its characters and their crumbling world. Meanwhile, the use of actual protest footage disregards the roar of the faceless crowd against the suffocation of this nuclear family’s private rebellion.

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

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

Of course, the metaphor is all subtle. The titular parasitic tree that strangles its host from the inside is a blunt but effective metaphor for Iranian theology. Like a tree, the regime wraps itself around its people, squeezing the life out of them under the guise of security. Russoloff’s direction is similarly blunt, unexpectedly fiery, and, at times, teetering on the edge of melodrama, but when the reality is this brutal, the subtlety feels almost dishonest.

By the time the film turns its broken family into a 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 streamlined resolution or a comfortable aftertaste. Rasoloff knows better than to offer catharsis while the fight is still raging. The sacred fig may suck the life out of its host, but it cannot kill what lies beneath – the roots that resist, grow, and push back. And the exiled thorn in the side of Iranian theology understands that all too well.

It would be almost laughable, if it weren’t so incongruous, that a film as immediately urgent and important as this was relegated to the purview of a “special” award at Cannes, while its competitors were soon Also given a chance to win the Best Picture at the Oscars. Few films are so inextricably tied to the oppressive soil from which they’ve been clawed, and yet here was Russoloff’s masterpiece, born from suffocation that was commanding respect.

What does it mean to protest against a system designed to crush you? What happens when the actuators of that system start turning on their own? And, most importantly, how long can such a system survive before its roots collapse? Rasoloff doesn’t have an answer, but he doesn’t need one. He has already planted the seed.

The Seed of the Sacred Fig is currently playing in theaters.