This review is based on a screening at the 2023 BFI London Film Festival.
Grieving for something you have already lost is quite an odd thing – a death that kills twice. It’s a type of mourning that often uncovers painful possibilities, unfinished conversations, and a vast collection of “What if?”s. It is also what kickstarts Adam’s (Faraz Ayub) journey in Moin Hussain’s feature debut, Sky Peals. A service station worker, Adam arrives home one late evening after his shift to a message from his father, Hassan (Jeff Mirza). The thing is, Adam hasn’t seen or heard from his father in over two decades, since the day he walked out of the door never to return to the family home he shared with his wife and young son.
It’s not long after his father’s missed call that Adam hears of his death. Years after losing his father as a young boy, Adam loses him again as a grown man, the sudden wave of grief bringing up traumas he’d hid safely under a blanket of denial. Hassan’s death reunites Adam not only with troubled patches of his past but also with his estranged father’s family. The reunion is a painful walk down memory lane, and the more the man learns about his late father, the more he questions himself. Such an overwhelming wave of information proves hard to navigate, and soon the emotional impact finds a physical escape valve in suffocating panic attacks paired with disorienting bouts of amnesia.
Adam is never explicitly given a neurodivergence diagnosis, but one is strongly implied. Sound design is used to amplify the deafening nature of crowded spaces, a feeling complemented by Nick Cooke’s skilful cinematography. Narrow corridors and dark office spaces contract around Adam like traps and overexposed lights glare brighter and brighter to cause a severe sense of disorientation. The service station acts as a limbo, a place that could be nowhere and everywhere, suspended in the middle of the night. There, Adam finds pockets of safety within the chaos, be it a few minutes inside the walk-in freezer of the shabby fast food outpost where he works at or a quiet moment up the escalator as the whirring of the rolling belt plays a calming lullaby.
In this grasp of Adam’s particular experience of the world and those in it, Sky Peals plays as a moving – and greatly sensitive – portrayal of neurodivergence, even if it dodges labels in the process. Hussain’s understanding of the emotional fabric of his main character is so refined it doesn’t need to appeal to rejection to make a point of how detached Adam feels from life around him. The people in Adam’s life offer him nothing but kindness, from his mother’s (Claire Rushbrook) loving way of pushing him out of the nest to his boss’ (Steve Oram) nurturing management, rooted in a deep belief in Adam’s professional merits. Hassan’s family brings his orphaned son under their wing, looking fondly at the past while always making sure to discuss the possibilities of a future.
Newcomer Ayub finds great beauty in moments of stillness, curling into himself to communicate the excruciating pain of overstimulation and beaming his big brown eyes at people as he tries to navigate tricky social interactions. Alongside him, the always brilliant Rushbrook makes the most of the few scenes she's in, speaking honestly about the heartbreak of being abandoned and having to raise a small boy in a strange town after being plucked from home by a man who had no intentions to raise a family alongside her. This unfiltered dynamic between mother and son, a relationship built on truthfulness even when uncomfortable, is the loveliest pairing in a film that dedicates breathing time to exploring companionship and empathy in its many different forms.
Much attention has been paid to the recent British wave of coming-of-age debuts, from Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun to Molly Manning Walker’s How to Have Sex. Not so much attention has been paid, however, to how first-time British filmmakers have made beautifully nuanced films about the complexities of the country’s diaspora in the last couple of years. In 2023 alone, the subject has been tackled by satire (Naqqash Khalid’s In Camera), horror (Paris Zarcilla’s Raging Grace) and Hussain’s moving foray into magical realism. This willingness to tap into the grief that comes from cultural and geographical displacement to reflect on isolation allows Hussain to build a moving portrayal of otherness as its own form of grief.
