In Conversation: Cyrus Neshvad on Child

Child was one of the most quietly unnerving films I saw this year. It begins as a lean, morally queasy drama about a mother who will cross any line to save her own, and then, without warning, it slides the floor out from under you and becomes something else entirely. I gave it three and a half stars, and you can read my full review here.

It is the feature debut of Cyrus Neshvad, the Luxembourg film-maker of Iranian heritage whose short The Red Suitcase was nominated for an Academy Award. He was generous enough to answer some questions for me, and we got into the leap from short to feature, the moral question at the film's core, the deliberate swerve into horror, the trust he built with his actors, and the personal roots that run beneath a story he describes as being about "burnt children". His answers were as thoughtful and unflinching as the film itself, so I have kept them in full below.

Child is your feature debut after the Oscar-nominated short The Red Suitcase. What did you most want to carry over from short-form storytelling, and what surprised you about sustaining that intensity across a whole feature?

I don't see much difference between making a short film and a feature film. For me, the process is exactly the same. It's like constructing a building with two apartments or twenty apartments. You still need a foundation, a roof, windows, and everything that holds the building together. The scale changes, but the way you build it remains the same.

At its heart the film asks what a parent would do, what line they would cross, to save their child. What drew you to that question, and did your own answer to it shift over the course of making the film?

For me, the heart of Child is the conflict between morality and instinct. The mother eventually understands that what she has done is unacceptable. As she grows closer to the other mother, she begins to regret her actions and even asks for forgiveness for having taken her daughter's life. But what interested me most is what happens at the very end. Even after everything she has understood and regretted, in her last breath, her maternal instinct takes over again. She gives the other mother a photograph of her son, asking her to save him. That was the question I wanted to explore: can a parent's instinct to save their child become stronger than morality itself?

The opening act is a lean, morally queasy drama, and then the film deliberately changes register. Without giving anything away, what made you want to break the audience out of the world they think they are watching?

I wanted to make a movie that the audience could accept as something that could really happen. That's why I begin the film in a very realistic atmosphere and slowly move into horror. Let me give you an example. If somebody falls into boiling water, they will immediately scream in pain and know what is happening. But imagine putting someone in water at a comfortable temperature and then slowly heating it up. At some point, they will burn without even realising how they got there. That's what I wanted to do with Child: slowly bring the audience into the horror without them noticing exactly when they crossed the line.

That shift is a bold gamble. Were you ever tempted to stay in the grounded, dramatic lane, and what did you feel the swerve let you say that a straight drama could not?

We live in a sad world where the rich part of the world thinks it can buy everything it needs from the poor and vulnerable part, even the most precious thing they have: the heart of their children. And the more the rich exploit the poor, the more they create monsters out of them. And one day or another, those monsters will come back for us. If we look closely at the situation in the world today, we can see that this is already happening. It is this horror that pushed me to cross the line into the horror genre with Child.

Brigitte Urhausen and Malik Zidi are hugely committed as the parents, in roles that ask them to go to some very dark places. What were you looking for from them, and how did you build the trust to get there?

I pushed my actors to always think about their own children in every scene, to keep them connected to the reality of their own lives and bring that reality into the film. I felt that the more real their emotions were, the more the sense of dread would come naturally.

The film is brisk and tightly controlled at around seventy-eight minutes, and the make-up and effects punch well above the budget. How did you decide what to show and what to withhold, and how important was restraint to you?

For me, the audience is scared when they don't know what they are dealing with. They don't know how to react, and they want to find out what is happening, so they keep watching very closely even though they are scared. But if the audience knows and sees everything, then they can protect themselves. So I wanted to keep things hidden and let the audience slowly discover what they are dealing with.

You are a Luxembourg film-maker of Iranian heritage telling a story that feels almost mythic and borderless. How much did those roots shape the film, and what do you hope travels with it to a UK audience?

The only thing I can say is that, through the war in Iran and immigration to a country where I often felt different, I am unfortunately one of those burnt children.

My thanks to Cyrus Neshvad for his time and his candour, and to Shelly at Strike Media. You can read my review of Child here.