There are glinting reflections of such wily British experimenters as Nicolas Roeg and Peter Strickland, too, in his filmmaking, though little feels derivative here: There’s a confident starkness to DP Tasha Back’s compositions, which bear the hard gloss of a world Aden can’t quite penetrate, and to Paul Davies’ rich sound design, which amplifies even a pin piercing a shirt collar to a forbiddingly alien degree.Īt a script level, “In Camera” perhaps has an excess of enticing ideas, some given more breathing room than others. It’s a device borrowed from Yorgos Lanthimos’s “Alps,” which is some clue as to the prickly, perverse narrative games Khalid is playing here. (Filmmakers get likewise boxed and branded according to race: Khalid winkingly namechecks himself as the director of a hot project, though an actor’s agent only recalls him as “whatever, the Asian dude.”) To make up the rent for the spartan apartment he shares with distracted doctor roommate Bo (Rory Fleck Byrne), Aden has to get creative, acting as a bereaved woman’s dead son in a therapy project that goes gradually haywire.
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The first of several unexpected pivots is that it’s this barely-noted extra, not the star, that we follow off the set: This is Aden, and while an incidental corpse isn’t much of a role, it’s at least one that he’s managed to book.įor the rest, his career is largely made up of unsuccessful auditions, his days spent lined up with British-Asian actors who look superficially like him, as they repeatedly vie for the limited roles available to men with their skin colour: Getting to play a generic Middle Eastern terrorist is one of the more plum opportunities.
Between takes, the disgruntled lead (Aston McAuley) fumes over the phone to his agent, desperate to exit the show the murder victim, T-shirt streaked with fake blood, offers him a fannish compliment, getting a brusque “Yeah, sure” in response. It opens on a gaudily lit crime scene, as hardened detectives mutter familiar clichés over a dead body - barely maintaining the illusion of reality ahead of the reveal that we’re actually on the set of a middling police procedural series. But it’s also notable as a debut, straight up: As formally vital as it is thematically ambitious, Khalid’s film kicks off what will surely be a busy festival tour in Karlovy Vary’s Proxima competition, while discerning distributors should be drawn to its gleaming technique and topical resonance. “In Camera” is notable as a debut for the gutsy, darkly hilarious accuracy of its take on an industry where people of color are still patronized as interchangeable quota-fillers, and where notions of “authenticity” are commodified to the extent that they become entirely imitative poses.
Self-reflexive satirical filmmaking of this nature is relatively rare on the British independent scene - perhaps, in part, because financing and producing features at all is such a strenuous endeavor that artists are loath to bite any of the various hands feeding them.
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