Film Review: What Will People Say

The opening of Iram Haq’a sophomore effort, What Will People Say, perfectly sets the stage for the kind of experience you should expect. It starts with a familiar image, one that usually indicates warmth – a father, Mirza (Adil Hussain) checking on his kids before he goes to bed. However, something is off, the score is pulsating like something out of a thriller, it builds and builds as we cut between him and his teenage daughter, Nisha (Maria Mozhdah), running back home and into bed before he looks into her room. Of course, she makes it into bed in time, but things will change for her soon. One night, she is caught trying to sneak in a boy into her room. As punishment, her father takes her to Pakistan against her will, where she is left with her relatives.

The film, which also serves as Norway’s submission for the next Academy Awards, is inspired by the experiences of its writer/director, who was also caught with a boy and forced to live in Pakistan for over a year when she was 14. Because of that personal connection, the film manages to be one of the most viscerally upsetting films I’ve seen in a while. Obviously, the situation itself is more than enough to elicit sympathy from the audience, but Haq has a deft hand in dramatizing the events in a way that goes for the jugular. She doesn’t hold back from the ugliness and abuse, and it puts you in the character’s head space in an incredibly effective way.

The phrase “what will people say,” or if we’re gonna be completely accurate, “log kya kahenge,” is the phrase that will trigger countless kids of South Asian immigrants in western countries. The parents cling to their culture, afraid to lose it due to assimilating to western society, since a lot is often scarified just to get to where they are. Culture is often the one thing they have as they rebuild their lives in a place they might not fully understand. So, any expression that is seen as too different could result in hostility, and it can range from the kind of clothes you wear to something like being caught with a white boy, like with Nisha. Even I’ve had that phrase thrown at me a number of times growing up, with the latest being less than a week ago.

Knowing the significance and weight of that phrase does help provide certain nuances to the film that might not be so obvious to people who aren’t. I have some mixed feelings about this. From an outsider’s perspective, I can see someone using the film as an example of how backwards South Asian communities are, and use it to fuel further ignorance, mostly Islamophobia, which has been on the rise in recent years. The actions of some of the characters, especially the father, can be misconstrued as caricature, but it’s all rooted in emotional honesty and legitimate insight. Lines that might be considered over-the-top are things that even I have heard coming from the older generations of my family, and some others (though, I should make clear, the context of those are nowhere near as dour as this).

If I used the same argument that a story of abuse in, for example, a white, conservative Christian household needs to go out of their way to say that they don’t represent all white, conservative Christian families, it would feel intellectually dishonest. There are nuances to be found here, but they are subtle, unlike the sequences of abuse that Nisha goes through. It’s also an issue that needs to be confronted by members of the South Asian community, and by not holding back, Haq provides an outlet that allows for a pure expression of her experience, while also bringing some personal catharsis. Obviously, not all South Asian families are this abusive to kids not behaving “traditionally,” but that doesn’t mean we can pretend there isn’t still some ugliness that needs to be challenged.

I was very deeply affected by What Will People Say, and it’s beyond the usual middle-brow misery porn that would usually exploit hardship for hollow sympathy. There’s a specificity to the story here, to the way it’s told, the way it’s expressed that shows how personal it all really is. Iram Haq is clearly a terrific filmmaker, and she knows how to grab you by the throat and hold on before finally letting go in the satisfying closing moment. Mozhdah is able to effortlessly carry the story on her shoulders, making the most out of a character, who is – by design – more reactionary and passive than one with agency. It’s a move that will move you and fill you with rage, but more importantly, it shows that if we aren’t willing to learn and listen, we will only continue to hurt the ones we love the most.