Sky Peals reminds us that even if you feel alienated from the community around you, you are not alone
Moin Hussain’s debut film elegantly explores mixed heritage in a time of unnerving identity politics
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A favourite joke in my family is to tease my English grandmother that she could heal the world as she is one of the few people who married a Muslim, a Christian and then a Jew. My branch of the family tree comes from the first of her three marriages; my mother would go on to marry just the once, still happily with my Sudanese father more than four decades later.
There’s so much joy that comes from being part of a family with mixed heritage. I could write a whole article solely on the wonderful selection of soups in my life, recipes handed down from the shared customs and stories of my ancestry — from the pogroms of Lithuania, the suburbs of Northern Ireland and the Egyptian-Sudanese border. Still, mixed heritage in a world of identity politics remains isolating, as filmmaker Moin Hussain explores in his hypnotic debut sci-fi feature Sky Peals, which reaches UK cinemas on 9 August.
The film’s protagonist Adam Muhammed (Faraz Ayub) is a shy and lonely figure, working nights serving fast food to weary travellers at the Sky Peals motorway service station. His isolation is, to a degree, self-imposed, purposefully spending his days and nights with as little human contact as possible. Outside of work, he lives with his white English mother Donna (Claire Rushbrook) and is paralysed by the prospect of moving out, as she prepares to sell their home and live with her boyfriend.
Adam, much like the titular Sky Peals itself, exists in a liminal space, never feeling fixed or of a specific place with a defined identity. It reflects the existential confusion within Adam’s own identity, outwardly viewed as a person of colour but raised by a white mother and fully immersed in a culture that views him as other.
One day, the Pakistani father he hasn’t heard from in years leaves him a voicemail. Before Adam can choose whether or not to act upon it, another call comes through, this time telling him that his father has died.
He then tries to piece together who his father was, and what that means for who he himself is, using only the clues of what was left behind by a man who abandoned him. As this is a sci-fi film, the answer is more complex than being a Pakistani immigrant.
Adam becomes a man obsessed, poring over security footage of his father’s final moments, fixating on each glitch and inconsistency. He begins to lose time and feel even more disconnected from the world around him, concluding that his father was not quite of this world, which explains why Adam has always felt so out of place.
Ultimately, Adam is presented with a choice. To give away the specifics would be full-blown spoiler territory, but at its core, he must decide if he should embrace the alienation he’s felt his whole life.
The first time I saw Sky Peals at the Venice film festival in autumn 2023, it seemed to have a very precise resonance for those who feel only partly grounded in the culture around them. But watching it again as Black and brown people are treated as an alien, invading force in country-wide riots, it feels crueller still. Perhaps in Adam deciding whether or not to be part of the world around him he is also deciding whether to open himself up to all the hostility that whizzes up and down the motorway.
Sky Peals is a work that only improves upon rewatching and further contemplation. It accomplishes what so much of the very best of sci-fi can do: heightening a situation into the fantastical to unveil human truths that many of us would rather not confront.
A lifetime of ticking “other” on so many official forms while straining under the pressure to be “one of the good ones”, is something the film speaks to with unnerving but poetic elegance. Choosing to exist in a place with which you only partly identify is to exist in a perpetual state of unease, to be frequently misunderstood and threatened.
For all who feel vulnerable, alienated and terrified right now, Sky Peals may prove a little respite. It’s a reminder that even if you may feel untethered from the community around you, you are not alone.
Sky Peals is in UK and Irish cinemas from 9 August.
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