In the Shadow of the Cypress: An All-Around Triumph

At Berlinale, Ethan Hawke called all artistic effort a compassion engine. He must have had Hossein Molayemi and Shirin Sohani’s In the Shadow of the Cypress in mind. It is a film that closes its impassioned fingers around your aorta and strums feeling right into your bones. 

The story of a father, daughter, and trauma the size of a whale clogging up their relationship into a putrefying mess, the 20-minute film expands itself beyond the material constraints of its runtime using incredible imagery and even better writing. But what hits you first at the primal level is its use of sound. As yet another PTSD episode breaks out within the confines of the seaside house, the first victim this morning is the pet fish. The film understands that more than the image of cruelty, it is its sound that evokes its magnitude best. Is it because we cannot bear to watch what we are forced to hear? Every thud, crack, and splatter hits you with the force of unmanageable terror. Do we worry about the goldfish or the woman? The film infuses the former into the latter just in case the viewer does not remember how to empathise with female pain. Astute.

But what initially comes across as plain brutality shows itself to be much more complex, even if the end results exist independently of the source. It allows the film to have something other than a villain and a victim in it. It preserves the possibility of a human(e) relationship. So when he disintegrates into grains of nothingness at her decision to finally leave him to his pain, his urge to stop her carries the hope of understanding rather than blunt repulsion.

A literal whale takes the story by its horns and leads all characters towards a destiny different from what they might have imagined for themselves. The unbelievable, magnificent, stuff-of-fantastic-dreams creature is stranded on the beach, which is also basically the humans’ front yard. What ensues is so unbelievably moving on the first viewing, you might be tempted to go in for a few more so as to tame the storm it raises within you. It is the pet fish’s doom, multiplied a thousandfold. How can two humans triumph against something like that?  

It is a profound moment when the father steps in to help, and fails. For once, his violence is brandished with the hope of helping. While she may only harbour vague optimism, which may even look foolish against the backdrop of a lifetime of unmitigated cruelty, he experiences within failure the possibility of existing as someone other than the sum of their ghosts. 

As they both labour under the weight of their humanity, as frail as their spindly limbs, time trickles away with blistering determination. The skin begins to heat up. The seagulls swoop in. The daughter hopes her patches of laundry might keep this giant whale from simply melting away. It makes you wonder which of the many ways that death is approaching would be the kinder thing. 

The narrative splits into three as life and death hover over the characters like the seagulls, as impossible to ignore as to fight. The film, by being keenly poetic in its thorough knowledge of what it is talking about, very deftly sidesteps the kind of broad strokes dramatics Hollywood likes. But it never considers being nihilist, which is also something Hollywood enjoys from time to time. In fact, and this is the highest compliment we can pay the film, hope has not felt so credible in a long time as in In the Shadow of the Cypress.

Watch In The Shadow of The Cypress Animated Oscar Nominated Short Film Trailer