Review: Ish

Director:  Imran Perretta

Stars:  Farhan Hasnat, Yahya Kitana, Joy Crookes

In the wild undergrowth on the outskirts of London Luton Airport, two boys on the verge of young adulthood play and pick blackberries. Inseparable besties Ish (Farhan Hasnat) and Maram (Yahya Kitana), both 12-year-olds, exist in the sometimes harsh realities of contemporary Britain. Children of ethnic minorities – Indian and Palestinian respectively – their version of carefree is eminently believable, but exists within a set of unspoken parentheses. Imran Perretta’s impressive directorial debut unfurls slowly, prioritising the casual glory of youthful, directionless days, but pits these best friends against an unseen prowling menace; a racist police state that they have every right to be wary of. Diaristic adventures are intermittently interrupted for the dark moves of a surveillance van, it’s unfeeling technology scanning the faces of Luton’s burroughs for potential threats. Their looming intersection feels grimly inevitable.

Perretta wears a couple of hats confidently here, directing with an assured and well-realised sense of the age groups and cultures he’s investigating. He also provides the film’s notable original music, one of the year’s most evocative, memorable and diverse set of compositions, which help lift Ish out of the doldrums of ten-a-penny social realism. In fact, Ish is sometimes close to the borders of something much more ecstatic. A scene of the boys and their friends playing in a park soars on high-falutin orchestration, rendering the everyday exceptional. Later on, an adventure in the dark with stolen fireworks becomes impressionistic. Youths running with flares like Olympians. All of this rendered in a stylish and timeless black and white by My Father’s Shadow cinematographer Jermaine Canute Edwards.

An unjustified stop and search proves a catalyst for various forms of change in the narrative, a domino effect itemised for the remainder of the running time. Maram, the taller lad, is the one bundled into a police van out of nowhere, while Ish obeys his fight or flight response and bolts for cover. Following this he finds himself outcast from the social group by Maram. Guilt and the resentful peer posturing on one side, and a family racked by grief (Ish’s mother passed relatively recently) on the other create a sudden sense of isolation for Ish over the course of the film’s endless summer. 

Perretta may present in monochrome, but his film is far from black and white, combatting certain assumptions while retaining an unvarnished sense of reality. Teenage gangs, for instance. The one Ish and Maram are a part of are prone to juvenile delinquency and petty crime, sure, but they’re also caring and respectful of one another, manifesting their own evolving morality. Maram’s older friends are also Palestinian, and Ish in part acknowledges growing up in the shadow of a far-off genocide, and how intrinsically that becomes tied to one’s identity. At their semi-secret base in the overgrowth prior to their encounter with the police, Maram shows Ish his toy kit to fend off the IDF. 

It is in this enclosed, secretive environment at the film’s beginning that Ish and Maram play at fighting, with blackberry juicies in their mouths so they can spit ‘blood’, emulating boxing matches or violent movies that they’ve seen, projecting themselves into their own fantasies of adulthood. The dull, cruel realities of British racism are a sobering slap in the face, shorn of glamour or excitement. Ish doesn’t telegraph a simple reconciliation between the boys, and one might argue that it’s stronger for it. In rejecting notions of a cosy conclusion Perretta reinforces his point that consequences are substantive. The domino once fallen doesn’t right itself.

But there’s an unexpected positive for Ish in all of this. One might argue that the events documented ultimately encourage him to reconnect with his family. Chief among these moments is a beautifully underplayed scene of precious sibling intimacy with his older sister Samira (Joy Crookes), the pair left unsupervised on the family sofa. But don’t misconstrue my meaning here. Ish does nothing to compensate or condone the fascist overreach of the state. Perretta merely utilises the fallout to engender moments of humanistic engagement. To hold the mirror up.

There are so many small successes here, from how Perretta and his startlingly accomplished young actors (Hasnat especially) manage to convey a sense of interiority and introspection, to the subtle feathering of passively aggressive racial sentiments. The boys enjoy a day at a travelling funfair. It might not even catch your attention that the midway is festooned with Union Jacks, but their presence feels like a tacit reminder of the kind of implications that bite prevalently at healthy multiculturalism across the UK. See too the suggestive threat of a football crowd crossing paths with Ish and his father Naeem (Avin Shah). The man impulsively pulls his boy tighter. The police are almost never on screen, but Perretta’s motif of occasional POV interludes – redolent of Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin – succinctly generate a peripheral air of menace and distrust. 

Impressive, unsentimental but deeply felt, Ish is a standout debut, one that offers a fresh perspective on this specific microclimate of UK culture. A minor key major accomplishment.