Joyland (2022)
★★★½ — Joyland (2022)
There's a shot in Joyland where a character sits in silence, hemmed in on all sides by the architecture of a family home, and you feel the walls pressing in. Nobody says anything. Nobody has to. That's the kind of filmmaking this is: patient, precise, and quietly devastating. Pakistani cinema doesn't often make it to screens here in the UK, and when something like Joyland arrives, it demands to be taken seriously. It more than earns that attention.
Part of what makes it so striking is that it refuses to be the film its marketing sometimes implied. Yes, there's a trans character at the heart of it. Yes, Alina Khan's performance as Biba is a genuine breakthrough, a magnetic, dignified, deeply felt piece of acting that announces her as someone to watch. But Joyland isn't a film "about" being trans in any narrow, issue-of-the-week sense. It's about cages. The ones built from gender expectations, from tradition, from the quiet suffocation of family duty. Biba's cage is just one of several the film holds up to the light.
The central story follows Haider, a man drifting through a strained marriage, who takes a job as a backup dancer in an underground cabaret and gradually falls for Biba. His arc, from dutiful son and husband to someone beginning to question everything he's been handed, is handled with real subtlety. There's no melodrama, no sudden epiphany. Just a slow, uncomfortable awakening. Beside him, his wife (played with heartbreaking restraint by Rasti Farooq) is doing her own quiet rebelling, longing for something as basic as autonomy in a home that treats her like staff. These two parallel arcs are where the film is strongest. Two people, trapped in different ways, reaching through the bars of their respective cages.
It reminds me, in some respects, of Mustang, another film that found enormous power in the slow, grinding weight of tradition bearing down on individuals who simply want to live. Joyland has that same quality of simmering tension, of lives half-lived under watchful eyes.
Where I have to be honest, though, is that Joyland tries to carry more than it can comfortably hold. It wants to critique patriarchy, explore queer identity, examine arranged marriage, comment on economic hardship, and use performance itself (on stage and off) as a lens for all of it. Each thread is handled with genuine care and intelligence. None of it feels exploitative or cheap. But together, they crowd the narrative until some of the moments that should hit hardest simply don't have room to breathe. You're left admiring the ambition, while wishing some of it had been set aside. This material could honestly sustain three films. Trying to serve it all in one means certain ideas get shortchanged just when they're getting interesting.
And yet. What it does achieve is remarkable. Not just as a marker of where Pakistani cinema can go, but as a piece of global storytelling that earns its place alongside the best of world cinema. It's bold and tender in equal measure, and it asks the right questions even when it can't quite find space to sit with the answers.
Three and a half stars.
Joyland isn't a perfect film. But it's an important one, and a sign of a genuinely fearless new voice. Just shy of greatness, but undeniably powerful. If you haven't found it yet, track it down.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 2022 | Watched: 2025-08-09
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Rent: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Sky Store
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Sky Store
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: Amazon Prime Video · Philo · OVID · Fandor Amazon Channel
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Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
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