Brides Review
In 2020, Sarah Gavron’s Rocks claimed its rightful place as one of the few modern films to depict young Muslim women in powerfully authentic ways. Now, Nadia Fall’s Brides takes up the mantle at a time of increasingly divisive rhetoric surrounding Muslims, radicalisation and young girls.
Despite its title, its framing, and the trailer’s hard focus on teenage girls Muna (Safiyya Ingar) and Doe (Ebada Hassan), Fall makes Brides a potent tale of adolescent pressures in a desperately intolerant British society, rather than one of pigeon-holey radical labels. The two girls are not just Muslim, but also Pakistani and Somali, respectively, to the distaste of their classmates and sometimes teachers, too. As they experience rejection after rejection from their peers, strangers and their families, both girls find themselves drawn to the only community that seems to understand them and their values — the Muslim sisters in Syria.
There’s a key decision in this film that helps distinguish it from any tale on teenage radicalisation: Muna and Doe are not the ‘same kind’ of Muslim. Muna didn’t wear a Hijab before embarking on their escape route from the UK, and Doe puts down the veil during their travels “until they get to the border” on advice from their Syrian friend, Hanan, a connection to their new life that never turns up to meet them at the Turkish airport. This fallibility as teenagers, as Muslims, as young girls, is the embodiment of the rare authenticity Brides will be long celebrated for.
These are two girls who fail to be accommodated and accepted in their daily lives, driven to what they see as their only choice, united in their friendship for each other. Ingar and Hassan’s chemistry is devastatingly convincing. Every high — like their antics in the airport duty-free — to every low when their feelings about going back home are misaligned, every moment is an ode to the young girls affected by the misdirected blanket of Islamophobic rhetoric in the UK. These two young actors could well be the turning point in female Muslim representation on-screen.
For once, Brides is a film that does not need the weight of geopolitics to empathise with Muslims, nor a manipulative score. Fall’s clever and non-invasive non-linear plot teases mystery and uncertainty in just the right ways, with flashbacks slowly unravelling Doe’s seeming distaste for Western society and exposing it instead as Western society’s inability to see past its provocations.
Coming in at just over 90 minutes, perhaps some of the curiosities Fall creates are a little under-explored: where the vitriol, harassment and struggle are aptly narrated, the family lives, school environments, and online climates could have had more fleshing out. For a Muslim-Pakistani like me, the subtleties were picked up; for an unaware viewer, those details may get lost in translation. Nevertheless, Brides and Fall’s debut will be remembered and referenced — rightfully so — with Ingar and Hassan’s leads opening the doors a little wider for representation and casting to stay authentic for the sake of great storytelling.
★★★★
In UK cinemas September 26th 2025 / Ebada Hassan, Safiyya Ingar / Dir: Nadia Fall / Vue Lumière /15
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