Year: 2023

Runtime: 95 minutes

Written and directed by: Naqqash Khalid

Starring: Nabhaan Rizwan, Rory Fleck Byrne, Amir El-Masry, Gana Bayarsaikhan, Liv McMullen, Josie Walker

By Sarah Manvel

“In Camera” is a perfect choice for the closing film of the first Muslim International Film Festival, as it’s about the struggles of a young Muslim actor to make his way in the UK film industry. Many movies have depicted the struggles of jobbing actors but few have been so explicit about the dissonance that comes from competing against people who are your ‘type’ –how this is so significantly worse when you aren’t white. But the alienation and despair of “In Camera” is much broader than that, and by holding its nerve it becomes a creepy indictment of the state of the modern world. 

We don’t learn his name until nearly halfway through the film. Aden (Nabhaan Rizwan, who has both a great face and a capacity for disquieting calm) is an actor, an unsuccessful one, identified by number in auditions and first seen as the corpse-of-the-week in a police procedural. So little care is taken with him that he’s not even given a costume and must lie on the floor in his own clothes. But any part is better than nothing, especially as he’s behind on the rent for the flat he shares in London with a junior doctor named Bo (Rory Fleck Byrne, who’s unusually good in this unusual part). Bo is so overworked he’s barely keeping himself together, having repeated hallucinations of vending machines in the middle of the road and glass buildings bleeding blood. A third flatmate moves in, Conrad (Amir El-Masry, always a delight). He’s a director for a menswear company, suave and confident, with a self-assurance that goes beyond his fashionable clothes. He takes a shine to Aden, expressed through advice about how this is a great time to be non-white in the industry. Aden doesn’t agree, but says nothing. Conrad also offers Aden modelling work, which he takes out of financial necessity. He reluctantly chats with the photographer at the shoot (Gana Bayarsaikhan), who used to act herself, but stopped because she didn’t like being told how to stand and what to wear. But this is exactly why Aden likes acting; it’s so organised, and he doesn’t have to decide anything for himself. 

Tasha Back’s cinematography is done in a brightly alienating style, where everything is a little too tasteful, that highlights the falsity of most of Aden’s encounters. This is especially funny in the audition scenes, where Aden must perform various Hollywood stereotypes – American teen, gun-toting terrorist, you know the ones – to casting directors who give no help other than to ask him to play with ‘middle Eastern’ accents. Guy Thompson’s production design uses large blocks of color, reflected from Natalie Roar’s costumes such as Bo’s bright green scrubs, Conrad’s plain white t-shirts, or a yellow sweater that Aden likes to wear to auditions, to somehow make everything feel noticeably blank and unusual. Paul Davies’ sound also repeatedly emphasizes buzzing noises, and Bo using his stethoscope to listen to inanimate objects in increasingly concerning ways. The soundtrack also includes women singers, including Halsey, Mitski and FKA Twigs, not usually heard in a movie about men, though “Boys Don’t Cry” by The Cure over the closing credits answers that. There are few soft edges here, just lots of mirrors reflecting back things that Aden doesn’t like to see. 

The most horrible sequence is the one that Aden brings onto himself. The idea is introduced in an acting class, where he and another student (Liv McMullen) learn how to ignore language and mirror each other’s emotional energy. Later he’s in a therapy session for a woman named Joanna (Josie Walker), playing the role of Joanna’s recently deceased adult son. He’s meant to be silent, to listen to the things that Joanna never got to tell her son in life, but something clicks in him and he begins to engage, telling Joanna the things that he thinks she wants to hear. And this leads to Joanna inviting him, as her son, to a family dinner in her home. 

The equally horrifying (but horrible) “Another End,” which had its world premiere at this year’s Berlinale, also had the concept of people surrendering their bodies and sense of self in order to provide so-called closure to grieving relatives. But what Aden is doing here is far worse: he so intensively dislikes his own self that all he wants is to disappear into other people. Any other people. And the great thing about writer-director Naqqash Khalid (in his first feature film) is that he takes this Möbius-strip-esque double concept of visibility and erasure all the way to its most logical conclusion. It’s a distressing and disturbing metaphor for acting as a career, the ways in which we see other people, how we exploit what we see, and the harm that can cause.