Before Nikkah Review: Walk-and-Talk Romcom

Two strangers meet for an arranged walk-and-talk around London in Haider Zafar’s Before Nikkah, an ode to a romantic classic.

Unlike the Before trilogy’s Jesse and Céline, who meet when they just happen to share a train carriage, there’s nothing coincidental about Isaam (Aakash Shukal) and Sara’s (Sasha Vadher, the film’s breakout star) encounter. They’re meeting to suss whether the other is marriage material; she greets him with a handshake. Isaam’s aunt chides him for being unmarried as he approaches 50 – he’s 31 – and has arranged for him to get to know Sara, who’s 23 and calls Isaam a boomer. Before Nikkah subverts Linklater’s trilogy by transforming Jesse and Céline’s effortless meet-cute into something tense. One couple couldn’t wait to get off the train together, the other is cripplingly hesitant. Sara criticises Isaam’s way of getting to know her by comparing it to a job interview. They wait for the conversation to flow naturally, but it never does. 

This is a more combative version of the romcom, in which assumptions and accusations pepper the smalltalk. Both accuse the other of being a coconut, imagine what each other’s dating history is like, and make sweeping statements in response to prompt questions like ‘what would you do with a million pounds?’ When Isaam says he’d make a film, Sara asks why he wouldn’t invest it or donate to a charity instead. Falling in love isn’t easy here.

Marcus Flemmings’ script defaults to these differences in character as a way for Isaam and Sara to open up. Isaam says men and women can’t just be friends, Sara says they can. She thinks life is about making everyone around you happy, he – quite crudely – thinks it’s about procreation. Opposites do attract, but by the time Sara lays out her stock as a woman who believes the world has some magic in it versus Isaam’s clinical and scientific worldview, one wonders whether they have too little in common to root for as a happily-ever-after. Flemmings’ dialogue is propulsive and playful, but little moments like Sara, who’s Gen Z, saying ‘epic failure’ – a millennial phrase if ever there was one – are infrequent bumps in the road. 

London has always looked great on film, and here it looks stunning when the young couple walk down leafy alleys in North London at golden hour. Autumnal hues and Sara’s warm knitted sweater are like a cosy cup of tea. It isn’t as radical as Rye Lane for projecting an underrepresented part of the city onto the big screen, but Before Nikkah romanticises the capital’s parks in particular as places where new lives are beginning in attentive conversations. Fans of spotting tube stations and Pret A Mangers are well served too. 

Readers of the Guardian’s Blind Date feature will find a familiar joy in picking a side here. Whichever character one feels a stronger affinity with is a fun Rorschach test. But that might also signal the film’s biggest romantic failing: by pitting them against each other so often, it is tempting to fall into Team Sara or Team Isaam rather than Team Romance. When Sara admits to feeling paralysed by all the things she cannot achieve by the time allotted to her in life, such a poetic notion is anathema to Isaam’s logic and factual interpretation of the world. 

The Before trilogy is deceptively simple, in that it isn’t at all. Before Nikkah adapts the concept on the surface, but can’t ever live up to Linklater and Kim Krizan’s naturalistic script, or Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy’s decades-long chemistry. By drawing attention to – and perhaps relying too heavily on – its influences, the film does itself a disservice, because this is a charming little romcom, in which ideas of cultural identity and what we assume on first dates are up-ended by two people who have both shown up somewhat reluctantly. There are conversations here, about faith, arranged marriage, cultural adherence, that I had never seen on screen before. So put comparisons to the Before trilogy aside; as a character-driven examination of an initial encounter, there’s enough in Before Nikkah for the film to stand on its own two feet.

Before Nikkah premiered at the at the London Indian Indian Film Festival in summer 2024. The film had a limited theatrical release in the UK on February 12, 2025 and will be released in more cinemas over the spring.