A service station employee believes he’s destined for something greater in a purgatorial British sci-fi. Here’s our Sky Peals review.
Adam, the shy, awkward protagonist of Moin Hussain’s feature debut, hasn’t seen his father in years. Since he was yay high, according to his convivial uncle. So, when a calm and clipped voice rings him in the middle of the night asking to talk, it comes as a bit of a shock. More shocking, even, than the second phone call a few hours later – the one telling Adam his father’s been found dead.
Our hero doesn’t seem too cut up by the news initially. His dad left a long time ago, after all. Besides, he’s hardly emotionally well-equipped himself: he spends his days staring at the start menu of a low-res computer game, his nights in the kitchen of a service station fast food joint. Through it all, he refuses to acknowledge he’s been kicked out of his house, content to keep his head in the sand while estate agents are trying to sell the grains packed around his ears.
He’s in many ways a completely maddening character, but Faraz Ayub brings just enough awkward watchability to his passive existence that the intrigue which surrounds him never quite goes away. It seems that everyone in his life, for somewhat inexplicable reasons, wants something from him: his uncle wants to bring him back into the family and the local mosque; his new manager wants to promote him out of his comfort zone; another co-worker wants to get off with him, and his mum wants him to do something, anything, other than sit at home staring at a polygonal sailboat.
But Adam doesn’t want any of these things. In fact, it’s doubtful he wants anything at all. Possessed by a sense of disconnection from everyone except the late father he never knew, what makes the man so different might just be that there’s nothing unique about him at all. Like the purgatorial service station he finds himself in, there’s an emptiness to Adam’s personality that borders on the unnerving.
Read more: UK creators call on AI firms to stop stealing their work
That melancholic oddness permeates every frame of Sky Peals, but the lingering portrait of lockdown-era depression does make it a bit of a slow watch at times. Adam might be an intriguing character, but he’s rarely an interesting one – though Ayub’s hangdog expression does its best to persuade us that his is a story worth listening to, the pace of the narrative stays at a solid trudge throughout. The lack of variety means that even the smartly constructed sci-fi conclusion can’t help but feel like more of the same. That’s a shame, when the rest of the film offers something eerily, decidedly different.
Sky Peals is in UK cinemas from 9th August
