“Do you ever feel that you’re in the wrong place?” asks Adam, the doleful hero of Moin Hussain’s debut film. “Like, if this is the place you were meant to end up?” Adam might conceivably be talking about life in the Sky Peals Green service station, where he works the night shift in a fast-food establishment, but his question goes wider; it’s the existential full house. His troubled dad, after all, believed himself to be an alien from outer space. Under the eerie lights of the station, Adam has started to wonder if he might be one as well.
Premiering in the critics’ week section here in Venice, Hussain’s creepy, distinctive British feature wrings the maximum mileage from its location, conjuring a liminal no man’s land where everyone is merely passing through (“Enjoy the rest of your journey,” reads the slogan by the main door). Adam is mixed-race, born to a white English mother and a father from Pakistan, and the film is best read as a pointed meditation on racial and cultural identity, dressed up as a kind of emo SF tale. Its inhabitants wander the corridors like sleepwalkers. Nobody is quite talking to anybody else.
If Adam feels alienated, it’s clear he’s not alone. Amid the film’s gallery of lost souls, only Steve Oram’s bluff, beaming manager seems entirely at ease, and while his full-throttle good cheer contains a slight edge of menace, that may be because we are seeing him through the hero’s warped gaze. As played by Faraz Ayub (formerly a support player in Line of Duty and Giri/Haji), Adam is lost and confused, a casualty of modern Britain. He is a danger to himself and possibly to others as well. On learning that his father died in the car park at Sky Peals Green, he starts rewinding through the security footage, observing the old man’s last movements and spotting a mysterious glitch in the footage that suggests he might actually be watching a ghost. His mum calls him constantly, but he rarely picks up. He suffers from blackouts and worries that he’s cursed. One night, while heading home, his presence alone seems to trigger all the car alarms in the lot.
Sky Peals’s lugubrious air of weirdness feels a little remorseless at times, but this is an arresting first feature – unsettling and effective. Hussain takes the humble service station and cleverly paints it as a nightmarish modern limbo, with the motorway repurposed as a secular River Styx. In order to cross it, Adam must climb the echoing stairs and navigate a narrow covered bridge illuminated by stammering strip lights. In his anguished state, he can’t say for certain what is on the other side. It might be heaven, a distant planet, or simply the service station’s southbound section, complete with a mirror-image burger bar and a man in the kitchen wondering if he’s in the wrong place.
