A newly bereaved young man has a close encounter of the paranormal kind in Sky Peals, the appealingly odd debut feature from British writer-director Moin Hussein. Riffing on ideas of fractured cultural identity and estranged families, Hussein’s bold hybrid blend of science fiction, social realism and ghost story has an autobiographical subtext, its plot partly inspired by the death of the director’s Pakistani grandfather. This is a commendably ambitious first film, though it ultimately promises more than it delivers, with a consistently low-voltage tone that undersells its rich hinterland of Lynchian weirdness. Following its world premiere in Venice Critics’ Week, Sky Peals will next screen at the BFI London Film Festival in October.
Although Sky Peals was filmed in various locations around the northern English county of Yorkshire, the story most takes place in hazy nocturnal No Man’s Land, both literally and psychologically. Adam Muhammed (Faraz Ayub) is a self-absorbed thirtysomething who works a numbing night-shift job at a fast-food diner in a 24-hour motorway services area. Glum and withdrawn, Adam seems almost catatonically alienated from events around him. His English mother Donna (Mike Leigh veteran Claire Rushbrook on reliably solid form) is selling the family house and moving away, forcing her clueless son to finally face up to adult responsibility and fly the nest. Meanwhile, Adam’s long-estranged Pakistani father Hassan (Jeff Mirza) keeps leaving him voicemails, urgently trying to reconnect after two decades of absence.
In a macabre turn of events, Hassan dies soon after leaving these messages, mysteriously taking his own life in his car. Even more eerily, his death occurs at the very same motorway services area where his son works. The tragedy obliges Adam to briefly reconnect with his affable uncle Hamid (Simon Nagra), who shares the shock revelation that Hassan was adopted, and semi-jokingly deemed by the family to have come from another planet. In Adam’s traumatised imagination, an intriguing suspicion starts to take root that his father was an extra-terrestrial.
In a further strange twist, Adam later stumbles across CCTV footage of Hassan searching the motorway complex on the night of his death. Apparently on a last-ditch mission to relocate his son, he suddenly disappears from the screen in what may be a freak video glitch or something more spooky. Meanwhile, assailed by strange visions and visual pyrotechnics, Adam’s behaviour becomes increasingly erratic, threatening to sabotage an awkward flirtation with his new co-worker Tara (Natalie Gavin) and an unwanted promotion from his comically over-friendly boss Jeff (Steve Oram).
There are strong, engaging elements at play in Sky Peals. Shooting in fine-grained 35mm, Hussein and cinematographer Nick Cooke capture the eerie, dislocating, edgelands feel of 24-hour motorway rest stops in the depths of night with an acute eye for detail. In fact, the film-makers used a half-empty shopping mall and a disused sports complex as stand-in locations, reinforcing the sense of a dystopian sci-fi netherworld. There are also pleasing hints of bleak satire in the grim workplace scenes at the burger restaurant, found-footage horror in the ghostly CCTV sequences, and hallucinatory surrealism in Adam’s recurring visual spasms. A slow, low, droning organ score by Canadian minimalist comopser Sarah Davachi amplifies this creeping Lynchian unease.
Sadly, most of these promising tangents remain under-explored. With its slow-burn tension and supernatural signifiers, Sky Peals wears the clothes of a paranormal thriller, but Hussein and his team play everything with an understated, deadpan blankness that weakens any sense of suspense. They also leave too many unresolved narrative threads hanging.
A final reckoning between Adam and his father, in a liminal zone between this world and the next, seems to herald some kind of explanatory resolution, but ultimately remains frustratingly opaque. Is this just the trauma-induced hallucination of a grieving son? A metaphor for mixed-up cultural heritage? A ghost story? A religious parable? A genuinely extra-terrestrial encounter? Hussein leaves us guessing, which is sometimes a smart narrative choice, but feels too slight and non-committal here. While there is is rich material here that could be more fruitfully explored in future films, Sky Peals remains disappointing earthbound.
Director, screenwriter: Moin Hussein
Cast: Faraz Ayub, Natalie Gavin, Claire Rushbrook, Jeff Mirza, Simon Nagra, Steve Oram
Producer: Michelle Stein
Cinematography: Nick Cooke
Editing: Nse Asuquo
Art director: Elena Muntoni
Music: Sarah Davachi
Production companies: Escape Film (UK)
World sales: Bankside Films, London
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Critics’ Week)
In English
91 minutes
