‘It was the moment I lost innocence’: how a childhood stop-and-search led to the British debut movie of the year

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When Imran Perretta was young, he was abruptly pulled by police into a van for questioning. That experience, as well as the death of his mother, inspired him to make Ish, a coming-of-age tale set amongst the British Muslim community. He talks about trauma, designing toilets and making Luton look magnificent Imran Perretta always knew that the title of his debut feature film would be “Ish” – short for Ishmail, the name of the 12-year-old boy from Luton at the heart of his story. Only later did people point out the similarity to other coming-of-age films with three letters in the title: Kes by Ken Loach, and Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy. Now, as the reviews trickle in, the comparisons to Kes and Apu keep coming. Like them, Ish is a poetic film that grabs you by the heart and pulls you into a child’s perspective on the world. The response has been lovely, says Perretta, and a relief. “It’s nice that people have compared Ish to those films rather than Kidulthood. I did worry about that.” Why...
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What Remains review – sky squid confounds Stellan Skarsgård in true-life Scandi noir

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Skarsgård and his son Gustaf sparkle in Ran Huang’s rarefied film, but can’t rescue this weirdly hallucinatory murder mystery from falling flat

This intense psychological drama has a squid in the sky problem. Specifically it’s that, by its halfway point, Ran Huang’s rarefied Scandinavian crime feature has fully established a predilection for spooky visual motifs, including eerie establishing shots and nocturnal scenes so murky it’s hard to know what’s going on (although the keening, discordant musical soundtrack suggests it’s probably something bad). And then seemingly out of nowhere, after a particularly emotional moment, there’s a cut to a forest treeline where some kind of cephalopod is floating in the sky, tentacles waving like one of those plastic “sky dancers” often seen in American car dealerships’ parking lots. Is it supposed to be a hallucination of the main character, Mats Lake (Gustaf Skarsgård), a troubled psychiatric patient who has recently confessed to a string of murders? Immediately after the squid shot, which lasts all of 12 seconds, the next one is of an impassive policeman smoking a cigarette, looking at the sky. Is he the one who sees the giant sea creature up there, but is somehow not even bothered? Is it supposed to be a metaphor? Or one of those fancy film-school distancing effects?

Given that the beastie is never explained, I’m guessing it’s meant to be a vexingly opaque symbol of what’s going on in the film itself. Basically, here is something bizarre and totally inexplicable happening in the peaceful Scandinavian countryside that’s so odd that nobody can process it – so no one comments on it, as if it’s not even happening. That would apply equally to the child murders Mats lays claim to, as well as the sexual abuse he claims his own father subjected him to when he was a child – abuse that his brother, Ralf (Magnus Krepper), does not recall at all. But Mats’ therapist, Anna Rudebeck (Andrea Riseborough), believes what Mats is saying, as does police detective Soren Rank (Stellan Skarsgård). Their faith in Mats as both perpetrator and victim is so profound that, when the evidence starts looking shaky and Mats fails to lead the police to a single victim’s body, they go on believing in him for reasons connected to their own troubled psyches.

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