Just One Film is a series that recommends individual films from festivals around the world—the movies you otherwise might have missed that deserve to be discovered.
The fall of “innocence” looms over girlhood, an hour of imminent despair. We arrive at the coming-of-age drama already well-versed in the limits she will encounter as she explores her sexuality: there are clashes and confrontations, frustration and discomfort. She may make questionable sexual decisions or very natural ones. She may have to abandon her own home to survive.
Haya Waseem’s Quickening belongs more specifically to those films that account for the sexual awakening of Muslim girls, divided between family influence and Western mores. In just the last few years there has been Iram Haq’s What Will People Say (2017), Jinn (2018) by writer-director Nijla Mu’min, and Minhal Baig’s Hala (2019). Waseem’s debut feature departs from its more straightforward predecessors by opening with a definition of pseudocyesis: phantom pregnancy, at one point crudely deemed “hysterical” pregnancy. This prelude makes way for Sheila (Arooj Azeem), a Pakistani-Canadian performing arts student, in the middle of a fidgety dance solo. She paces back and forth, wringing her hands and swiping her legs and knees of something clinging and unseen. The piece disappoints her professor, but betrays her brimming unease.
Her mother and father, Aliya and Azeem (played by Azeem’s real parents Bushra and Ashir Azeem), are not especially strict, although Aliya insists her daughter stay faithful to certain traditions and frets over her budding independence. Sheila clearly longs for more autonomy but generally enjoys a rather standard social life: college parties, good friends, and ambivalent boys. A crush on her white classmate Eden (Quinn Underwood) turns sexual, which inevitably means more to the inexperienced Sheila. Not long after it begins, Eden sheepishly ends the affair, confessing that he’s not ready for a relationship. Meanwhile, the barely concealed fissures in her home life finally yield to the flood: her father loses his job and the financial strain jeopardizes her parents’ marriage and their home. As her younger siblings contend—as grudgingly and indignant as can be expected—with their parents’ increasingly fraught relationship and a future move, Sheila’s belly grows rounder and bouts of vomiting seem to confirm her suspicions.
Already primed for this revelation, the “pregnancy” becomes the culmination of her largely unspoken turmoil, otherwise only discernible on the young Azeem’s face. Certainly it seems to reify her transition into womanhood, as much a tangible break from her mother (the more demanding parent) as a complex mirroring of her; she is never more far away or closer to Aliya than during this clandestine period where her responsibility to family outweighs her own desires. In that way the film is notably more gracious to its parents than its counterparts tend to be, but it also exaggerates the state Sheila has so long existed in already. “I never really thought about how I felt,” she says later. The “pregnancy” weds all the warring parts of her into a—perhaps deceptive, but no less material—reality she can no longer outrun.
The eerie, floating world conjured by Christopher Lew’s shadowy cinematography, at once exquisitely dreamy with a lurking sense of uncanny, seems to plant us in the middle of a ghost story or sci-fi, spiritually reminiscent of Joachim Trier’s Thelma (2017), another film about a teenager’s sexual (and supernatural) awakening after she leaves her conservative parents behind for university. Here, the camera creeps toward dimly lit characters, an oneiric portraiture replete with silky grays and blacks. In fact, Waseem’s film is at its most confident in its impressionistic visual architecture: a sea of bodies sprawled elegantly across the floor; outstretched arms in the dusky light of a dark room; billowing veils captured at a tilted angle as Sheila appraises two women in colorful niqabs on a misty street. There is an observational quality to its choreography as well, as we spy Sheila and her mother through a cracked bedroom door and, in another scene, the camera pulls back from the intimacy of Sheila and her sister playing in the yard to survey them at a distance through the window. Spencer Creaghan’s operatic and at turns foreboding score refines the soulful lyricism of these compositions, mapping the contours of Sheila’s interiority and growing alienation with a haunting grace, matched by Azeem’s magnetic and unaffected performance.
On occasion, the execution falters. Despite its concise runtime, a lull in the third act suggests minor missteps in either writing or pacing. Underwritten conflicts between Sheila and two girlfriends steer us away from more compelling family tension, possibly an unfair comparison, given the authentic chemistry between the Azeems (this film marks Arooj Azeem’s debut, but Ashir is an actor and director himself, known for the 1994 Pakistani television series Dhuwan, and Bushra appeared in his 2016 film Maalik). And there are arguably one too many shots of Sheila gazing soberly into the distance, at their least effective placed after especially dramatic scenes, impeding momentum. One such interlude, stunning enough to be forgiven for halting the action, emerges near the film’s climax: Sheila—clad in a pearly white and gold saree, cradling her now hefty belly—sways in the darkness, the only beacon of light on screen, as if standing on a pitch-black stage with the spotlight beaming down on her. A woman singing in Urdu echoes in the background.
Apropos, characters switch between Urdu and English throughout the film. So, too, Sheila must trade in her jeans and sneakers for a saree when she reluctantly accompanies her mother to formal events. If these stories often pivot on the tug of war between a character’s roots—with all its limits—and alluring, but not uncomplicated freedoms for the first generation (sexuality being particularly perilous for racialized women to navigate in predominantly white spaces), Quickening reframes this split as a possession: a living, breathing haunting, an eternal duality. In the most primordial doubling of all, Sheila bears the weight of all she refuses to face in front of her and behind her. Home, or lineage, becomes not just a place or a past, but an ever lingering and restless ghost. We always carry it with us.