In Camera (2024) Film Review: Assured Actor Satire

Nabhaan Rizwan plays a struggling actor in Naqqash Khalid‘s In Camera, an incisive and assured satire about performance.

Playing a corpse on the show, he is done after half a day and is quickly shuffled out in his own (now blood-soaked) clothes.

Now Aden has to try and find work again, going through multiple nightmarish auditions. One is a commercial for a tooth-whitening product. There are several TV pilots – and just as many rejections. However, things slowly change when Aden and his friend, junior doctor Bo (Rory Fleck Byrne, Pixie), get a new roommate. His name is Conrad (Limbo’s breakout star Amir El-Masry), and he is a smooth and stylish man specialising in menswear and lifestyle. Soon, Aden will try to take some of Conrad’s confidence as he seeks a new role.

The thing to note about In Camera, the first feature from British writer-director Naqqash Khalid, is that it has a disconcerting air throughout. Khalid opts for an ambiguous, unreal tone in his conversations and heightened, practically surreal imagery in other moments. The latter can be seen clearly with Bo, whose nightshifts at the hospital leave him hallucinating a vending machine in the middle of a country road or a building dripping with viscous red fluid. Meanwhile, from the buzzing swarm of flies heard from the start to The Carpenters’ ‘Superstar’ discordantly echoing through the hall where Aden waits for an audition, Paul Davies’ sound design manages to get under your skin subtly.

This unsettling feeling extends to Aden with his pensive looks and body language. He has a “really striking face,” as a photographer (played by Ex Machina’s Gana Bayarsaikhan) says to him – “harsh but soft.” Yet he seems destined to be a stand-in in his profession and this world, facing a constant and anxiety-inducing swirl of rejection. Rizwan captures this perfectly using that harsh but soft face, working well against El-Masry’s convincing turn as Conrad.

“Finally, the industry is responding to our needs, and you’ve got to make the most of it… We’re the new currency now,” Conrad says to Aden during her initial meeting, referring to their MENA statuses. Race plays a big part in Khalid’s satire, as he challenges how diversity is expressed by those in charge in tokenistic ways, with stereotypes and homogeny still emphasised. Take the audition scenes where Aden plays an American teen or a terrorist (being told by the casting director to do a generic Middle Eastern accent). Or the homogeny of blank audition rooms and men who look like Aden in plain T-shirts.

However, perhaps the most well-developed aspect of the film is its take on performance. The idea of playing someone else at the expense of the real – if there is any notion of being yourself, to begin with. Multiple characters boil the profession of acting down to saying other people’s words and being told where to stand. That is exactly why Aden loves the profession. He is someone who seems so unsure of himself, and the most alive when inhabiting a role. One of the ‘gigs’ he gets in between auditions is in therapy, helping a woman (Josie Walker from Kneecap) who recently lost her son by role-playing as him. There are no cameras, but he still gets in character, eventually to an uncomfortable extent. It is as if Aden needs to be in a state of continual performance.

Khalid’s interrogation of that theme is the best part of a film that never quite moves out of its unsettling rhythm or onto a different point. It feels like it has more to offer, like a proper resolution to Bo’s sub-plot. However, buoyed by great performances from Rizwan and El-Masry, In Camera is a film that is interesting, incisive and – above all – assured. Khalid knows the story he wants to tell and mostly pulls off the balance between challenging material and visuals. It is another strong debut from a British filmmaker forging their own unique path.

In Camera will be released in UK & Irish cinemas on September 13, 2024.