Starring Faraz Ayub, Claire Rushbrook, Natalie Gavin  

Written and Directed by Moin Hussain

In cinemas now

Working nights in the burger outlet at a motorway service station, Adam Muhammed is forced to ask questions about himself following the death of his mysterious father.

Anyone curious as to how best to experience paralysing existential and metaphysical dislocation (try anything once, I always say) need go no further than a British motorway service station late on a wet winter’s night. So ghostly are the bleary-eyed motorists, it’s easy to doubt one’s own corporeal reality, the glaring, greasy Formica precinct becoming a metaphor for our cosmological transience. Where are we going? Where have come from? It has to be somewhere pretty awful if we’re putting ourselves through this at three in the morning.

This is the world in which we are immersed in Moin Hussain’s compellingly atmospheric debut feature, Sky Peals. Working in the burger kitchen is Adam Muhammed (Faraz Ayub), a young man so painfully shy he can barely meet another person’s gaze or form a sentence of more than three words.  Adam is of dual heritage, although his Pakistani father has been absent since he was a small child. Ignorant of his roots, Adam is already precipitously uncertain of his own identity when we meet him at the start of the movie, learning of his father’s death.

As he struggles to grieve for a parent he never knew, he starts to learn tidbits about his Dad’s migration story, but his fragile world is rocked when he is told that his father may have taken a far greater journey to arrive in the UK.

Whether or not Sky Peals is actually science fiction is for the individual viewer to decide, but Hussain exploits cinematic sci-fi tropes to expert effect, wittily filming the service station with respectful nods to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, ET, 2001 and Alien to name but four of the movie’s influences. Intentional or not, there are even (brief!) notes of Tarkovsky’s Solaris in the film’s persuasive air of cosmic dislocation.

There are some delicately played turns from the always wonderful Claire Rushbrook as Adam’s well-meaning but distant white British mother; Natalie Gavin as a single mum who befriends the lonely Adam; and Steve Oram as Jeff, his well-meaning boss whose idea of good management is to promote the terrified and insular Adam insisting that he is most definitely a ‘people person’.

Verdict: Sky Peals is a slow burn – and definitely of niche appeal to sci-fi connoisseurs – but it’s an elegant 90 minutes that never tries too hard, rich with subtexts about migration, identity, mental health and bereavement. If I’ve made it sound like a grim watch, then I am doing the movie a disservice. It’s not without humour or optimism, and while it could be described as a mood piece, the mood it put me in was a definitely a good one. 8/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com