Writer and Director: Naqqash Khalid
Naqqash Khalid’s In Camera, screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2023 explores the process of acting and the nature of performance with a story that blends bizarre scenarios with fantasy and a psychological absorption in which main character Aden (played by Nabhaan Rizwan) adopts different identities as he tries to make it as an actor. “Smile and say the words on the page,” he tells a client and “acting is not that hard,” but the different demands placed on Aden suggest it affects him more than he realises.
Living in a flatshare with Bo a doctor (Rory Fleck Byrne) and new arrival Conrad (Amir El-Masry), a fashion consultant, as his homelife becomes increasingly disrupted, Aden also feels the pressure of enduring endless auditions with people who look like him and taking on bizarre jobs to pay the rent. Losing his individuality, Aden starts to think more about the image he presents, what makes him distinctive and how he looks to others on camera.
In Camera is a very strange film that places its hero in increasingly odd situations, either playing a dead body, appearing as one of many men in white t-shirts as part of a modelling assignment, helping a grieving mother through her therapy sessions by embodying the activities of her dead son and acting classes where he undertakes some elliptical exercises with other students. The story weaves between Aden’s difficult relationship at home where he starts to feel left out with the arrival of a new flatmate and his episodic working life that both leave him wondering where his life is going and the racial projections being placed on him by others.
There are themes about control and self-worth bound up in Khalid’s film and some of its best moments take the audience into Aden’s emotional state, representing times he feels uncomfortable, put upon and, occasionally, inspired or confident in roles he is assuming. Other times the oddness and fractured story telling is alienating, preventing the viewer from becoming too emotionally engaged with Aden and his friends by using traditional narrative structures.
A subplot with doctor Bo puts Aden’s story into perspective as he struggles to cope with the pressures placed on him, and these sequences increasingly take on a dream and horror-like dimension as the exhausted Bo imagines climbing into a washing machine or being doused in blood spurting from the hospital. But Bo isn’t sympathetic and his treatment of Aden is sometimes unconsciously racist, so the intersection of these two strands could be better elucidated while the purpose of Conrad is largely to make Aden feel inferior.
Khalid’s film is deliberately jagged and hard to read which some will struggle to connect with but it is inventive, skirting the boundaries of traditional filmmaking to provide an almost stream of consciousness experience of the industry and the nature of performance on and off screen.
In Camera is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2023.
The Reviews Hub Score
Deliberately jagged
