‘I think my dad might be an alien,’ says Adam (Faraz Ayub) around half way through Sky Peals. This could be the premise of a crazy knockabout comedy starring Will Ferrell but in the hands of debut writer-director Moin Hussain, it’s the polar opposite. Imagine Jonathan Glazer’s Under The Skin filtered through the deadpan energy of an Aki Kaurismäki comedy, it is low on dramatic incident, but high on a carefully crafted atmosphere and a true feeling for people who have slipped between society’s cracks.
The film is set mostly in the confines of Sky Peals Green service station, where Adam, a painfully awkward young British-Pakistani man, works at fast food joint Big Burger Trip. His uneasy existence is complicated, first by his mother (Claire Rushbrook) selling the family home and forcing him to find new accommodation (clue: he doesn’t), and more pertinently by a phone message from his estranged father asking to meet up. Further revelations about his father suggest to Adam that his father might not be from Pakistan as he believes but instead come from much farther away. In short, another planet.
Imagine Close Encounters, only from the perspective of the family left behind
Hussain has stated the film was inspired by Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but from the perspective of the family left behind after Richard Dreyfuss jumps on the Mothership. The film uses its sci-fi plot thread to play around with ideas around estrangement and not belonging, Hussain playing his cards close to his chest as to Adam’s true origins. Ayub struggles to illuminate a character who can barely talk or hold eye contact, but he’s still an engaging presence, especially in scenes with Tara (Natalie Gavin), a new co-worker who sees through his nervousness and seems to offer the one thing Adam is looking for: a spark of connection.
Sky Peals lacks compelling conflicts and narrative fireworks, but Hussain’s film is a mood. The director and his cinematographer, Nick Cooke, shooting on 35mm film, effectively find the otherworldly in the ordinary. Gaming arcades, escalators, walkways and motorways create a twilight world that feels more space station than service station (at one point, a symphony of car headlamps and indicators create a kind of Spielbergian light show).
It’s a droll, lugubrious effort that’s always singular and occasionally even striking. Hussain is a filmmaker to watch.
In UK Cinemas August 9.