Review: Home becomes a prison in the tense cross-cultural drama ‘What Will People Say’

You can pinpoint the moment early on in “What Will People Say,” Iram Haq’s tense and harrowing new movie, when 16-year-old Nisha (Maria Mozhdah) stops being a person in the eyes of her family and suddenly becomes a problem — an outcast, a liability, a shameful wound in their side.

It happens when her father, Mirza (Adil Hussain), finds her with a boy in her bedroom one night and flies into a rage. Leaping to the conclusion that the two have had sex, he savagely beats the boy, Daniel (Isak Lie Harr), and all but disowns his daughter on the spot. It’s a tough, violent moment that rips a hole in the story’s fabric, drawing the intervention of social workers and turning a family’s private anguish into a painfully public spectacle.

“We can’t face anyone anymore,” mutters the girl’s mother, Najma (Ekavali Khanna), some time after the incident. She’s speaking about her fellow Pakistani emigrés in their small, wintry Norwegian town, but the curious thing is that despite the family’s deep fear of pariahdom — a fear concisely articulated by the movie’s title — we never really see them being shunned, ostracized or even gossiped about. Haq, who at times pushes her story to the brink of overstatement, proves smartly reticent on this matter. Is she shielding Nisha and the audience from the worst of it? Or is she suggesting that the family’s concern might in fact be a kind of paranoia, a foolish overreaction to stigmas less real than imagined?

That question makes for a rare zone of ambiguity in a story of otherwise blunt, palpable outrage. In dramatizing the fury with which Nisha’s parents respond to their daughter’s perceived self-abasement, Haq effectively throws it back in their faces. And when Nisha is suddenly kidnapped by her father and her older brother, Asif (Ali Arfan), and sent back to live with her aunt and uncle in Pakistan, the movie becomes something more than just another tale of cross-cultural, cross-generational misunderstanding: a harrowing drama of emotional abuse.

As Haq has said in interviews, the events of “What Will People Say” — like those of her 2014 debut, “I Am Yours,” to which this film serves as a prequel of sorts — are drawn from personal experience. (The director was only 14 when her parents sent her from Norway to Pakistan, and she remained estranged from them for years afterward.) You can sense Haq’s precise hand and eye in the sympathetic etching of Nisha’s folks early on, and in her exquisite feel for the social precariousness of a minority community torn between the desire to assimilate and the refusal to give up its traditional values.

Like so many children of immigrant parents, Nisha embodies that dilemma so acutely that it has effectively split her life in two. At home, she is respectful and obedient, not afraid to speak her mind, but always speaking it in her family’s native Urdu. Elsewhere, she fully embraces her identity as a child of the West, returning Daniel’s affections and occasionally sneaking out to dance and party with her school friends.

Nisha isn’t the only one who feels this tension. In an early scene, her father, to whom she is especially close, enjoys loosening up and dancing to some ’90s Indian pop with his family and friends, only to be scolded afterward by the more rigid Najma. It’s one of the movie’s more nuanced observations, though nuance mostly goes out the window — partly, though not entirely, by design — once Nisha is sent back to the home country for re-education and punishment.

Life in Pakistan — its hot desert golds forging a stark visual contrast with the cooler, icier tones of Norway — is both simpler and, as Nisha will learn in one terrifying scene on the streets at night, far more complicated. Despite the haughtily repressive treatment of her aunt (Sheeba Chaddha), she adapts easily enough to the different customs and climate, and also to the friendly overtures of her cousins. But as she plots her next move, torn between her desire to escape, her curiosity about her new home and the inconvenient matter of her still-burgeoning sexuality, “What Will People Say” lapses into a hurtling, melodramatic thriller mode that, whatever resemblance it may bear to real-life events, jettisons much of the first act’s cultural and psychological intricacy.

The emotional momentum, however, is carried along easily by Mozhdah, making a remarkable screen debut: In an instant, she can melt from trembling vulnerability to hair-pulling defiance, and in nearly every scene, we see her not just emoting but also thinking, continually renegotiating her position in a world that perceives her as tainted goods. The movie is with her at every step, though in truth it might have been an even sharper, more insightful one had it left her side on occasion, or pried open more of a window into her parents’ underlying motives.

Audiences unaccustomed to seeing shame-based cultures addressed or depicted at length may well ask themselves: How could anyone treat their child this way? It’s a question Haq seems to be asking as well. She doesn’t make the mistake of depicting Nisha’s parents as cardboard villains, least of all her father. (In his quieter moments, Hussain makes clear that Nisha isn’t the only one who’s trapped by conservative, patriarchal mores.) Still, there are aspects of this family’s character and ideology — whether you call it ingrained sexism, a misguided understanding of honor or a deeply damaging fear of female sexuality — that feel under-examined or at least unarticulated.

Unable to confront or even mention these tough subjects, Nisha’s parents retreat into bludgeoning insults or resentful silence, falling back on the stock language of propriety and repression. Is this a failing of the film, or of the culture under scrutiny? It’s hard to tell, and therein lies both the insight and the frustration of this tough, compelling movie: It’s not about the dangers of what people say so much as what they won’t.

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‘What Will People Say’

(In Urdu and Norwegian with English subtitles)

Not rated

Running time: 1 hour, 46 minutes

Playing: Laemmle’s Music Hall 3, Beverly Hills (starts Aug. 3) and Laemmle’s Playhouse 7, Pasadena (starts Aug. 4)

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justin.chang@latimes.com

@JustinCChang