Rob Munday
Science-fiction has come a long way since it was simply thought of as tales of space battles and little green men. Today’s sci-fi stories have evolved to a place where things can be a lot more subtle and thought-provoking, the boundaries of the genre pushed to new and exciting places. At times you might not even be sure if you’re actually watching a sci-fi at all, like with Moin Hussain’s excellent follow-up to Real Gods Require Blood, Naptha.
A filmmaker who admits to being “always interested in drama, social realist storytelling”, where his previous film took elements of that approach and blended them with a horror narrative to create a truly haunting watch, Naptha does similar with science-fiction. Except Hussain isn’t looking for frights here, instead this story of a father and son team who run a small isolated petrol station is a much more personal film, dealing with some very real emotions around themes of identity, as he explains in this interview with Film4:
“I was born in East London, and I moved to Norfolk when I was about 12. It was a massive culture shock for me. I went from the most multicultural, urban school to the whitest town ever. My dad’s from Pakistan. I’ve never been to Pakistan, I’ll probably never get to go. I don’t speak the language. Yet my dad would say ‘this is this place you’re from’, and would tell me all of this stuff about my cultural identity. And for me, it was so abstract, you could have been talking like you were from Mars. So it manifests itself in the film in a way that it’s this strange, abstract place in the stars that seems supernatural, completely untouchable.”
“When you make your first films, you draw on personal experience. I do feel English, but I don’t feel culturally, completely English. But then I don’t feel culturally, completely Asian, or Pakistani. So, should I be making films about British Pakistanis? That’s my dad, that’s my cousins – that’s not really me. So I guess I’m trying to find a way to explore an aspect of culture and identity that I know is part of me, but I don’t have that much access to, so in a way an alien conspiracy makes a lot more sense.”
A character piece set largely in one location (a petrol station in Cornwall), Naptha really lands its impact thanks to some stellar acting from its two leads Divian Ladwa (Faraz) and Ernest Ignatius (Malik). In a way, the story here is pretty simple, but its elevated by both Hussain’s confident filmmaking approach and his cast’s authentic performances. The bond between the two central characters feels so real, that when his father appears to be losing his grip on reality the worry and burden placed on Faraz’s shoulders is so tangible you want to reach through the screen and help him carry it.
Those performances are amplified by Hussain’s simple but effective filmmaking approach. Employing a lot of close-ups, to both capture actor reactions and make the audience unsure of what is real and what is imagined, it’s an immersive piece which isn’t interested in transporting you light years across space, but instead places you in the heart of this small family as they have to face the truths of their situation. There are a few brief abstract moments in the film, right at the start and (spoiler warning!) right after the father disappears, but apart from those you can really see that social realist influence in Hussain’s work and like with Real Gods Require Blood it makes for an interesting and intriguing twist on genre filmmaking.
There are a lot of exciting filmmakers coming out of the UK at the moment and Moin Hussain is up there with the best of them. With his debut feature Birchanger Green (which has a premise that sounds similar to that of Naptha) currently in post-production we’re excited to see what the filmmaker can achieve with a longer runtime.