Ish ★★★

The title of Imran Perretta‘s bleak debut feature Ish evokes a short form of Ismael, the Melville-inspired name of its child protagonist, but also the English suffix that suggests something incomplete, vague. This dual meaning mirrors the main character’s hovering between childhood and adolescence, grief and joy, innocence and racist scrutiny. British-Asian Muslim Ish (Farhan Hasnat) lives in a Luton steeped in the xenophobic anxieties of the post-9/11 era with his best friend Maram (Yahya Kitana). The 12-year-old boys grow up under the eye of suspicion until their friendship is violently disrupted by a police stop-and-search. Marking the abrupt end of whatever childlike naïveté was left in them, the event becomes a catalyst for a greater psychological and structural rupture. 

Ish reels in the aftermath of his mother’s death, with grief seeping into his everyday moments. His grandmother Nanu (Sudha Bhuchar), father Naeem (Avin Shah), and older sister Samira (an underused Joy Crookes) make up a family desperately trying to hold together. But it’s the bond with Maram that offers him a brittle sense of belonging. Narrative tension hinges on a harrowing moment during an arbitrary and clearly racist stop-and-search. Maram is seized and while Ish flees, leaving his moral integrity and their friendship irrevocably fractured. Focusing on the aftermath of silence, guilt and shifting glances, the betrayal is framed in lingering takes and moments of uncomfortable silence that avoid simplifying the trauma. 

Himself a visual artist with a history of work on displacement, surveillance, and racialised identity, director-writer Perretta shapes his cinematic world with observant intensity. Ish is shot in monochrome by Jermaine Canute Edwards, a choice that casts the town’s mismatched suburban sprawl and woodland hideouts as a timeless terrain. This somewhat stereotyped portrait of urban decay becomes intriguing thanks to the expressive black-and-white cinematography and strong sense of time and place. Acting and atmosphere do the heavy lifting in this ambitious examination of the systemic criminalization and societal vilification of growing boys. Ish and Maram still roam through woods, ride bikes, and attempt to make sense of a world that looks at them as delinquents in the making. 

Everyday acts like collecting blackberries, watching planes under Luton’s airport flight path, and cobbling together a makeshift fort carry an air of lost innocence. Inner city streets and suburban parks become liminal spaces where imposed identity and belonging collide. These sequences are structured as splintered set-pieces of childhoods gradually overshadowed by anxiety and alienation. Perretta and co-writer Enda Walsh bring an unflinching pragmatism to the taut script. It places the moments of boyish escape within a wider social climate where surveillance and prejudice are routine. Slowly and sadly the seemingly unshakable camaraderie dismantles in a series of subtle fissures. Hasnat and Kitana bring a natural openness to their vivid performances, emphasizing their intuitive chemistry.

Frequently targeted by counter-terror policing, Luton becomes a pressure point that determines the boys’ futures before they even understand its impact. Intermittent flashes of point-of-view surveillance footage fracture the naturalism, hinting that unseen eyes are always watching. Distressed visuals underscore that their cast world is also suffocating. Some narrative strands, such as radio reports on Gaza or glimpses of algorithmic facial-recognition footage, feel more like echoes of Perretta’s wider artistic interests than fully integrated plot threads. Likewise, character arcs are sketched more lightly than their emotional potential suggests. Yet, Ish’s clear-eyed portrayal of a friendship tested by systematic forces impressively captures the threshold moment of youth when socio-political prejudices and pressures seep in.