Moin Hussain
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In film and TV, aliens have come in all shapes and sizes. Among them are the seven-limbed floating heptapods of Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival and, much less ethereal, Adam Sandler’s talking arachnoid companion in Spaceman. Thanks to the Alien franchise alone onscreen extraterrestrials gained an additional two dozen guises.
It is slightly more unusual for them to assume human form, as is the case in Moin Hussain’s debut feature film Sky Peals, now released digitally after having screened at the Venice and London film festivals last year to critical acclaim. But any unearthly activity in this understated sci-fi is mostly metaphorical: Hussain, probing themes of mixed-race identity and second-generation immigrants, points to a much broader definition of the word “alien”.
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The film’s marriage of this subject matter and its sci-fi elements makes it unusual, though it shares some of the gritty naturalism and brooding, portentous spirit of Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin – as well as having an alien disguised as an earthling in common. Like Glazer’s film, Sky Peals has a crackling, cosmically static, pent-up quality that signals the interference of extraterrestrials with our planet.
At the eerily deserted Sky Peals Green service station somewhere in the UK, Umer (Faraz Ayub) works night shifts flipping burgers for straggling travellers. His mother Donna (Claire Rushbrook), who calls him by the more Westernised name Adam, is in the process of relocating to her partner’s abode in Hertfordshire. This leaves Umer alone at home, with just a few stray boxes of packed belongings for company.
In the dead of night, he begins to receive out-of-the-blue phone calls from his long-estranged Pakistani father Bilal (Bhasker Patel) – a man always on the move – but he lets them ring through to the answering machine and Bilal’s stiltedly polite, cryptic messages sound out into the darkness.
The alien ploy is a clever vehicle through which to unpick the feeling of being torn between identities
Whatever comfort Umer clings to in his humdrum routine is thrown into uncertainty when he learns that Bilal has been discovered dead in mysterious circumstances. Uncle Hamid (Simon Nagra), Bilal’s brother, arrives on the scene, ready to take care of funeral arrangements and ensure Umer is handed down his father’s meagre set of possessions: the car and clothes in which he was found. Revealing that Bilal wasn’t his biological brother, but simply showed up in his family’s village one day, Hamid is also able to divulge his suspicions – that Bilal wasn’t one of them; that he was from outer space.
Reeling from this revelation, Umer starts to wonder whether he too is in the “wrong place”. The alien ploy is a clever vehicle through which to unpick much more grounded sentiments on being torn between two different identities.
The fact that further along the line Umer becomes plagued with blackouts and apparently abnormal powers – specifically, an ability to trigger car alarms – feels a tad inconsequential when set against this dense thematic terrain. Plot is less important here than omens and atmosphere, and Hussain makes full use of the symbolic heft of the service station and the surrounding motorways as a location in limbo.
Some of that energy could have been better channelled into rounding out the characters, who can feel flat. This is especially true of Umer’s new colleague at the fast-food joint, Tara (Natalie Gavin), who, for reasons unexplained, sets about trying to tease out his fun side. In terms of dialogue, even Umer – albeit an ill-at-ease outsider – is rarely allowed to venture beyond a few monosyllables.
But in its own way, the strange stuntedness of the social interactions contributes to the odd, otherworldly feel of Sky Peals, populated by characters seeming to sleepwalk listlessly through existence.
Part sci-fi, part family drama, part coming-of-age tale, whether Umer really is an alien or not is ultimately irrelevant: Hussain’s film occupies its own distinctive universe.
Miriam Balanescu is a writer and critic based in Cambridge, UK
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