Moin Hussain (2023)

Writer-director Moin Hussain’s debut feature dramatises, as well as feelings of alienation, what it means to be an alien.  The main character in Sky Peals, Adam Muhammed, is the thirtyish son of a white English mother and a Pakistani father, who disappeared from his wife’s and son’s lives years ago.  Adam still lives with his mother, somewhere in northern England or the Midlands, but she and her partner are about to move to Hereford, and Adam needs to find somewhere else to live.  Lying in bed one night, he doesn’t answer the phone when it rings but plays back a message from his long-absent father, who wants to meet up, explaining that he’s not far away.  Adam doesn’t follow up the message; soon afterwards, his uncle gets in touch with the news that Adam’s father has been found dead in his car.  Not long after that, Adam learns the vehicle and the dead man were discovered in a car park outside Sky Peals Green, a motorway services station where Adam works shifts in the kitchens.

Adam (Faraz Ayub) doesn’t seem to belong anywhere.  Once his mother (Claire Rushbrook) and stepfather have moved out, he’s on notice to vacate their property.  His communication with work colleagues is minimal.  He feels out of place at his father’s funeral, held at the mosque where his Uncle Hamid (Simon Nagra) worships.  Adam’s cousins are strangers to him, as is Muslim culture generally.  His uncle, who addresses Adam by a Pakistani name (Umer), now reveals to his nephew that they’re not blood relatives, that Adam’s father, Hassan, was adopted by Hamid’s mother after he ‘appeared’ in the family’s native village in Pakistan.  Hamid tells Adam that Hassan not only came from ‘somewhere else’ but had the idea that he wasn’t human at all.  Adam starts to question his own identity as never before – a questioning accompanied by other kinds of displacement.  He keeps experiencing brief jumps forward in time, not knowing how he got from one place to another.  Hassan (Jeff Mirza) appears in, and unaccountably disappears from, CCTV footage of the services station car park.  Traffic headlights on the motorway occasionally merge with lights in the night sky.  The Sky Peals Green complex, comprising plenty more than the catering facilities, is itself an alien(ating) landscape – a maze of corridors, walkways and what seem to be empty spaces.  (The film was shot on various West Yorkshire locations.)  Jeff (Steve Oram) joins the fast-food team as its new manager and organises a staff social as a team-building exercise.  This is a memorably desolate occasion, not least because not much happens.

Moin Hussain, who is thirty-two and, like his protagonist, has a white English mother and a Pakistani father, tells Claire Armitstead in a recent Guardian interview that:

‘I think there’s a lot of conversation at the moment about identities and who we are, and there’s a real drive of people wanting to identify themselves in one particular way. But I really think that can limit us. We’re really all a mixture of things, and the culture itself is becoming more and more mixed. But we’re all getting very boxed-in. That’s something that I wanted to explore, because I haven’t seen it on screen that much.’

Not only is this refreshing to hear from a young film-maker; Sky Peals succeeds in raising the issue, metaphorically rather than explicitly.  It nevertheless depends crucially on the actor playing Adam, who needs to carry the film.  Faraz Ayub has an IMDb list of screen credits going back to 2008, mostly television work, but not in lead roles.  When an actor gets as deep into character as Ayub does here it’s understandable that the director, perhaps especially a newcomer to cinema features, is so grateful he just lets him get on with it.  Whatever the reason, Ayub is allowed to dictate the tempo as a whole.  He’s good – he does carry Sky Peals – but the film certainly takes its time.  Both his mother and Tara (Natalie Gavin), a work colleague who takes a shine to Adam, sometimes get impatient with him but not, it seems, because he speaks so slowly.  Ayub’s halting speech occasionally brings to mind Casey Affleck’s in Manchester by the Sea (2016) but Affleck’s delivery made complete psychological sense in Kenneth Lonergan’s fine film:  Lee Chandler was so convincingly mired in despondent self-reproach that, whenever someone tried to bring him out of it, Lee seemed to ask himself if it made sense to engage with that person, and usually decided it didn’t.  There’s not that kind of rationale in Sky Peals.

Moin Hussain doesn’t always follow things through.  Adam visits a doctor about his memory lapses but there’s no diagnosis or treatment.  When senior managers visit the services station to review Jeff’s progress, Adam’s contribution brings about a debacle but there’s no follow-up to this either.  Steve Oram is amusing but the role of affable, clueless Jeff is too broadly written – as when he says he wants Adam, who could hardly be less sociable, to take on the new role of ‘store greeter’ because ‘you’re a people person – I can tell’.  That kind of joke doesn’t fit in the scheme of the film but the other bits of humour are successful, welcome interruptions to the prevailing ominous mood.  It wouldn’t be right to give them all away – or reveal the relatively upbeat ending – but I have to mention the moment when Adam wanders into the meeting of a consciousness-raising group (‘discover your real self’) somewhere on the vast Peals Green site.  The convenor greets him by stressing that group members share whatever thoughts and feelings they would like to share.  Adam tentatively says, ‘I think my father might have been an alien’.  That shuts everyone up.

15 August 2024