‘Layla’: Sundance Review

Dir/scr. Amrou Al-Kadhi. UK. 2023. 99mins

Layla is a deeply personal story, open and committed to by all participants – but mostly writer/director Amrou Al-Kadhi, whose life this essentially reflects, and their alter ego Layla, played with sweet vulnerability by Bilal Hasna. It’s a picture that functions better on an intimate level than as a narrative, as Al-Kadhi fully opens the door to a world of queerness and chosen families. The London-set romance between non-binary Arab drag queen Layla (Hasna) and conventional gay white man Max (Louis Greatorex) is most successful as a path for multi-hyphenate Al-Kadhi to explore themselves on screen.

At times, Al-Khadi’s film feels like a torrent of pent-up expression, yet more often reads as a tender yearning

Commercially speaking, you wait years for a single British drag queen drama, then three come along in a row. Last year’s nail-biting Femme, with its Black protagonist, is worlds away from Layla. Unicorns, however, Sally El Hosaini and James Krishna’s Floyd’s drama, also about a Muslim drag queen, comes very close to Layla. It has just sold to Signature in the UK after positive reviews at Toronto 2023.

Premiering at Sundance, Layla will probably receive the most supportive reaction from the wider LGBTQ+ circuit, being the most emphatically authentic account of life on what for some is the margins, but for these beautiful creatures is the centre of the universe. In that singular, albeit restricted, way, its future is solid and predictable. Frank sexuality should not be a problem, but a scene involving a stiletto will severely restrict ratings if it remains.

At times, Al-Khadi’s film feels like a torrent of pent-up expression, yet more often reads as a tender yearning. Layla – once, and occasionally still, Latif – wants to love and be loved, yet their non-binary identity and out-there drag queen persona is not always a great fit with the conventional straight gay men they fancy.  They are, they say, ‘always in the in-between.’

Layla, whose reputation as a performer is on the rise, has thus created a world with their own chosen family. Like all the extravagant outfits and personalities, the clan is stitched together from a need to love freely and be their true selves. But that authenticity falters, however, in the face of Layla’s strict and devout Muslim family and, later, diluted to the point of confusion by their love for/infatuation with Max.

There is little doubt that Al-Kadhi has found themself in Hasna’s Layla. The actor gives the character such honesty that the performance does justify the adjective ‘brave’ – not for ‘playing queer’, but for the lack of vanity and unquestioning commitment to a role that requires a lot, even beyond covering themselves in cold microwave pasta in a Pride corporate cocktail staged by ‘Fork Me’ microwave dinners. 

Hasna strikes a touch-note for the rest of the performances and, as Max, Greatorex steps up to play a much less-well-defined part. Poor Max really is the ‘straight man’ to Layla’s exuberance here, and his character’s arc left to swing hopelessly. Perhaps Max’s blandness is a correction to the cinematic trope that all gay men are either inherently fun and interesting or hopeless villains.

Al-Kadhi also draws as much juice as possible from their micro-budget, 27-day shoot in East London, chiefly from Cobbie Yates as costume designer (although production design cleverly sees through and around the cheap-sequin glamour in the central club Feathers and its rooftop). It is easy to be dazzled by drag, of course, but Yates crafts for all the characters – undoubtedly guided by Al-Khadi, who performs themselves offscreen as Glamrou.

It is hard to tell the direction Al-Kadhi, who was a Screen Star of Tomorrow in 2018, will take from here. They have mined their own life to progress from four short films about queer people of colour: they act, write for TV as well as film, perform in drag and direct – and all that has been channeled into Layla. It is not a debut where it seems clear that the author could turn their hand to any material, neither does it bow to convention or try to finesse its rough corners into a sophisticated package as a ‘calling card’. Al-Khadi is flying their freak flag; what happens next will be down to them.