‘In Camera’: Karlovy Vary Review

Dir/scr: Naqqash Khalid. UK. 2023. 95mins

Twenty-something Aden (Nabhaan Rizwan) dreams of being an actor. But the grinding slog around the audition circuit, with its casual rejection and needling micro-aggressions, is starting to take its toll. Aden is flat, an emotionally two-dimensional presence with fantastic bone structure but an air of defeat. Then a new flatmate moves into his shared apartment in Manchester. Supremely confident and self-assured, Conrad (Amir El-Masry) works in fashion, but the main product he is pushing is himself. And Aden starts to realise that success is as much about the role he is expected to play off camera as it is about his performance on screen.

Bold, distinctive filmmaking

Premiering in Karlovy Vary’s Proxima competition, this debut feature from Naqqash Khalid is a savage satire that dips into unnerving fantasy imagery and squirmingly uncomfortable honesty, while also delivering some bleakly deadpan comic moments. A picture full of ideas, it is a tricky tonal juggling act: one that Khalid doesn’t always manage to pull off. Still, this is bold, distinctive filmmaking that should generate interest within the very industry that the picture skewers so unforgivingly.

In Camera, which was developed as part of Creative UK’s iFeatures slate, follows Khalid’s short films Parts (2016), which was shot in 12 hours with a crew recruited on Craig’s List, Ladies Room (2017) and Stock, for Sky Arts. Khalid’s unconventional approach to this feature’s themes – he describes it as partially “a fairytale” – might initially seem daunting from a marketing perspective. But the film’s unsettling oddness and striking imagery could be the very thing that helps it stand out in a crowded festival and theatrical landscape. It has the potential to connect with a younger audience in tune with the picture’s cynical take on late-stage capitalism and racial politics.

When we first meet Aden, he’s inert and covered in blood, playing a corpse in a generic TV cop show. The camera ignores him and follows the show’s young male lead, a brash white actor who is bawling out his agent over the phone because he had hoped to be released from his contract. For Aden, however, getting cast as a corpse is a career breakthrough: his first TV work. A series of humiliations on the set, and in the soul-crushing auditions in the following days, ensure that any spark of optimism in him is soon squashed.

Meanwhile, Aden’s flatmate Bo (Rory Fleck Byrne), a junior doctor, is so wrung out with exhaustion that he can hardly unpick reality from the waking-nightmare hallucinations that crowd into his consciousness. When Conrad moves into the apartment, his dynamic, upbeat energy is a stark contrast to Aden’s deflated passivity and to Bo’s ragged tiredness.

The uneasy dynamic between Conrad and Aden, both men of colour but at odds in terms of personalities, is fascinating and jarring – the anxiety that is baked into every element of the filmmaking, from the nervy, angular score to the ultra-tight focus on judgemental faces, adds to the discomfort. Bo’s subplot, however, is less successfully realised and feels a little superfluous.

“Represent or become irrelevant,” Conrad tells Aden, filtering the complexities of racial politics through his ready supply of slick marketing jargon. Having attended a few too many casting calls for brown-skinned actors in white t-shirts, only to see the same ’unproblematic’ actor get the job every time, Aden is ready to listen, and to make his own opportunities going forward. But at what cost?