No-one understands the laconic, downtrodden Umer (Faraz Ayub). The manager at the motorway-skimming burger joint where he works somehow misinterprets his chronic shyness as extroversion, promoting him to the unwanted position of store greeter. His colleagues mistake him, a years-long employee, for a new starter because he’s so unassuming. And his own (white) mother – like all the Caucasian people he interacts with – doesn’t even call him by his name, instead favouring the more Anglo-Saxon-friendly Adam. In line with its despondent-loner lead, the unsettling, atmospheric Sky Peals resists comprehension, skirting multiple Big Ideas without ever landing on an overarching thesis.
Writer-director Moin Hussain, here making his feature debut, seems most at ease establishing the film’s foreboding tone. The locations Umer frequents, primarily the service-station restaurant and his home stacked with packing boxes, are desolate, liminal spaces where shadows significantly outnumber people and the only sounds are the eerie electronic hums of appliances. The inbetween-ness of these places mirrors Umer’s mixed-race heritage. With a Pakistani father and a British mother, he belongs to both cultures and neither, as illustrated by his inability to fully relate to any of his relatives (Umer’s white stepfather breaking one of his plates reads as a barbed comment on his ruptured family). It’s a fascinating point that the script underserves with derivative ‘Where are you really from?’-style discourse.
Indeed, the writing is what lets Sky Peals down. If you were to turn off the volume and just consider the images, it’d be a moody nocturnal horror, crackling with uneasy energy. Hearing the characters speak, the clichés — in both dialogue and circumstance — are made frustratingly apparent. Hussain shows promise as a filmmaker, and ably depicts the dreary solitude of the night shift. Sky Peals has a lot to say — about identity and belonging, about loneliness, about grief; the problem is, we’ve heard it all before.