89 min | NR | January 20, 2023 | Vertigo Releasing
A British Pakistani widow opens her dead husband’s phone and finds a woman in Calais. She crosses the Channel to confront the secret. What she does next is not what grief is supposed to look like.
Mary Hussain is a white Englishwoman who converted to Islam decades ago when she married Ahmed, a ferry captain who crosses between Dover and Calais. Ahmed dies suddenly in the opening minutes. Going through his things, Mary discovers a second phone and a French woman’s voice on it. She takes the ferry to Calais and finds Genevieve, and rather than confront her she lets herself be mistaken for a cleaner and walks into the other woman’s home. This is a film about a woman who has spent her life performing an identity for a man and now has to discover what is left of her when the performance has no audience.
Joanna Scanlan plays Mary as a study in containment. She holds her grief and her rage behind a face that gives almost nothing away, and the smallest tightening around her eyes carries the weight of scenes that other actors would play with tears. Scanlan lets Mary’s body do the work. She moves through Genevieve’s house with the heavy carefulness of a woman terrified of being seen. Nathalie Richard plays Genevieve with a defensive brittleness that slowly cracks, and Talid Ariss plays her teenage son Solomon with a confusion that mirrors Mary’s own. The scenes between Scanlan and Ariss find a tenderness that the premise has no right to produce.
Aleem Khan writes and directs his first feature with a patience that refuses melodrama. He stages the discovery of the affair without a single raised voice. Khan uses the white cliffs of Dover as a recurring image and films them collapsing into the sea, a literal rendering of the ground giving way beneath Mary. The cinematography keeps Mary in cramped interior frames, boxed by doorways and mirrors, so that the house she has invaded becomes a trap of her own making. Khan trusts silence and lets long static takes sit on Scanlan’s face until the discomfort becomes unbearable.
This is a film about the lies we agree to live inside and what happens when one of them dies before we do. Mary’s deception of Genevieve is monstrous and completely understandable at the same time, and Khan never lets the audience off the hook by resolving that tension. The film treats faith, marriage, and identity as things people build and inhabit rather than things they are born with. Khan builds his debut around a woman who has to decide whether the life she chose was real. He has the discipline to let her answer it in a glance instead of a speech.