‘Unicorns’: Toronto Review

Dirs: Sally El Hosaini, James Krishna Floyd. UK. 2023. 120 mins.

Although there was a decade-long gap between her debut film, My Brother The Devil, and the follow-up, 2022’s The Swimmers, it’s clear with Unicorns that Britain’s Sally El Hosaini has her own trademark style, enough to tentatively venture the term ‘El Hosaini-esque’. Directing this time with her writing partner (and star of My Brother…) James Krishna Floyd, her work is both biting and magical, in the way of telling difficult stories in a loving light. She challenges, and retreats. Confronts, but within a comfortable framework. And she’s a romantic: her characters always find their happy ending, even if they shouldn’t.

Like wrapping yourself up in a beloved book, Unicorns takes you to a new place, returning you charmed and changed

El Hosani is unafraid to court controversy in this gay-straight romance, depicting her Muslim drag queen co-lead (appealingly played by newcomer Jason Patel) at prayer. But we’ve seen this type of meet-cute, between the Mancunian Aisha, or Ashik (Patel) and straight Essex mechanic single-dad Luke (Ben Hardy) before - decades ago, in The Crying Game. While El Hosaini rapidly resolves the penis issue, the narrative clue here is how Luke encounters Aisha in the first place: it’s through a hidden door. We’re in Narnia, and whenever Aisha is in frame, the film takes on a bugle-beaded radiant glow.

Opening at TIFF a year after The Swimmers, this love fable goes out in a marketplace which may be concerned about some of the themes regarding Aisha’s Muslim faith and strict religious upbringing. Any viewing will dissipate fears as this film is sensitively-handled, using familiar narrative building-blocks, although it does court the possibility of sensationalist headlines.  From a ‘gaysian’ drag queen perspective, it is reinforced by the credibility of its consultant and co-producer ‘Britain’s first out Muslim Drag Queen’ Asifa Lahore. Writer Floyd has also spent some time in this world. So it’s fantastical, yet authentic. Rights are available, although the UK will be its first and best home.

Given she’s such an exotic creature, it’s no surprise that Aisha is the star of the show here and she certainly brightens up the picture after El Hosiani decides to open Unicorns in a grim open field, where Luke is having a spectacularly utilitarian sexual encounter. Hardy is almost unrecognisable in the role of a stifled single dad, a meat-handed mechanic whose life with his young son and garage-owning dad definitely lacks a feminine touch. Aisha, played beautifully by Patel, certainly has that in spades: they meet after Luke tumbles down an Alice in Wonderland portal/back door of a restaurant into a fizzing nightclub where Aisha is performing her act. They kiss, and soon Luke finds out what the viewer immediately understood.

Writing his first feature, Floyd drags his characters into unlikely situations, but the film, and the charisma between the co-stars, can take it. Aisha turning up at the garage, for example, wanting to hire Luke as her driver (he needs the money to take his son to Disneyland). Luke’s dad doesn’t cotton on. Did he not see Stephen Rea and Jaye Davidson in in The Crying Game back in 1992? Or Boy George a decade prior to that? Older people aren’t simple because they’re older. Just because someone own a garage doesn’t make them culturally oblivious - these are simplistic shortcuts in a film that asks for a nuanced look at the world. Whatever the case, soon Luke is becoming subsumed in Aisha’s life as a private dancer and beginning to understand how that world works - including the downsides, especially a rivalry between dancers which will have dire consequences in the third act.

Aisha also resumes the identity of Ashik and returns for a short trip to Manchester and life on a nosy-neighbours terraced street with a strictly observant family. The relationship between mother and son here is sympathetically, if not beautifully drawn. You could say the viewer sympathises with Aisha, but that’s a check from the very first scene — Patel draws her as a character it’s impossible not to fall in love with. It’s also pretty clear that we are in full-form romance mode by now, and reality is just the parts that the jewelled colours of Aisha’s outfits haven’t embraced yet. You either fall into this film’s fluidity, or you resist. El Hosiani and Floyd are making points, of course, but tugging the viewer very hard to embrace their leading lady. They make the way accommodating, with the three-act structure clear and reassuringly familiar even if the milieu is bracingly different.

Unicorns clearly has less production budget than Netflix-backed The Swimmers (yet considerably more than My Brother…) and feels fresher for it. Like The Swimmers, it’s too long by far. But Stuart Earl’s score and Iain Kitching’s edit work to propel Aisha forward, even when she wants to give up. Like wrapping yourself up in a beloved book, Unicorns takes you to a new place, returning you charmed and changed.