Nida Manzoor (We Are Lady Parts) arrived at Sundance Film Festival this weekend with Polite Society, a glorious send-up of Jane Austen, Bollywood, action movies, and social horror rolled into one blazingly fun movie that will put a smile on your face and keep it there for two hours.
Ria Khan (Priya Kansara, The Bastard Son & the Devil Himself) seems to be the only one worried when her sister Lena (Ritu Arya, The Umbrella Academy) quits art school and suddenly becomes engaged to Salim (Akshay Khanna). It’s all just a little too perfect for the teenager intent on becoming a stuntwoman in the movies. So, she enlists her bumbling best friends and her school bully to help her pull off the greatest wedding heist ever.
Manzoor has created a film that will no doubt draw comparisons to the work of Quentin Tarantino. This is fine. The director certainly knows when to turn up the action to eleven, creating highly stylized fight scenes that verge on breaking the fourth wall like Tarantino’s Kill Bill Volumes 1 & 2. Manzoor does so without Tarantino’s misogyny and not-so-subtle racism, however, and that puts the director of Polite Society head and shoulders over the other.
It helps that the director’s cast fully committed to their characters. No one here is a one-note player.
Kansara is electric as Polite Society protagonist, Ria. No matter how many times she’s knocked down, belittled, or told that she’s “ruining everything,” she sticks to her convictions and picks herself back up. Also, Kansara and Arya’s relationship is entirely believable as sisters who want what’s best for each other but who also still occasionally beat the hell out of each other, much to the detriment to their family’s home.
Khanna, meanwhile, is at once a confident geneticist with good looks and charisma to burn and a downtrodden mama’s boy who can’t dress himself without his mother’s help.
Further, Shona Babyemi, Seraphina Beh, and Ella Bruccoleri are perhaps the funniest trio of “sidekicks” one could imagine for the film. They deliver some of the most hysterical lines with the seriousness of Shakespeare and keep the viewer rolling with laughter.
Of course, one would be remiss without mentioning the film’s villainess played by the incredible Nimra Bucha. Some of you may have seen the Pakistani actress in the Disney+ series Ms. Marvel. Here she once again plays the protective mother with a secret, one that supplies the film with its social horror and quite honestly left me shook. Bucha is an actress with an incredible presence. You will be drawn to her, even as her plans are revealed, and that is a very good thing.
With all of these fantastic performances and with the heightened reality of the script, Manzoor does the impossible: keeping it grounded in a reality with real stakes. For both comedy and horror to work well, this is absolutely necessary, and the director does a brilliant job of creating emotional obstacles that are compelling enough to hold the audience in her palm as she doles out each chapter of her tale.
Does she stumble occasionally? Yes. There are moments where just a bit of tightening could have helped the overall pacing, but like her protagonist, she gets right back into the thick of the narrative and pulls off the impossible.
Polite Society is going to make a lot of must-see lists in 2023. Make sure it’s on yours.