Genre Drama

Nasib (2021)

Item: Nasib
Rating: 2.0
Author: Ross McLaren

★★ — Nasib (2021)

I'll be honest with you: I finished Nasib and sat there genuinely unsure whether the film had ended or whether something had gone wrong with the file. It just... stops. And in the space between pressing pause and checking the runtime, I had to ask myself whether I'd missed something, or whether the film really had said all it wanted to say before I'd even clocked that it had started saying it.

This is my Tajikistan entry for the A-Z World Movie Tour, and I mean this with the greatest of respect to Tajik cinema: it was a tough one. The film follows a mother and daughter getting on with life while the husband and father is away for work, presumably abroad. That detail stuck with me more than almost anything in the film itself. Remittances make up something like 30% of Tajikistan's entire national income. Thirty percent. That is a staggering figure, and it speaks to an enormous social reality: families separated by economic necessity, women left to hold everything together at home while the men chase wages across borders. There's a film in that. A really compelling, emotionally rich film.

I'm not sure Nasib is quite that film.

The central tension, such as it is, comes from the father calling home and insisting his wife wear a veil or headscarf. She refuses. That's a genuinely interesting thread to pull on, a quiet act of domestic defiance played out over a phone call, but the film doesn't really pull on it. It's raised, she pushes back, and then we drift on to something else. We also learn she's pregnant, which feels like it should matter quite a lot, but again the film seems oddly incurious about its own plot points. Things are introduced and then sort of... left there, like furniture nobody sits on.

I want to be fair here, because I genuinely don't know how much of my confusion is the film's fault and how much is down to the subtitles. They weren't great. There were moments where I suspected something more nuanced was being communicated, a line reading or a subtext, that just wasn't making it through the translation. With a film this quiet and this reliant on implication rather than incident, bad subtitles aren't just an inconvenience, they can completely collapse the experience. So I'll hold my hands up and say I may not have had the best conditions to judge it.

What I can say is that the film has a certain patience to it, a willingness to sit in the rhythm of everyday domestic life that I can respect in principle. It reminded me a little of what I admired about Mustang, that interest in women navigating constraint in their own quiet ways, though Mustang gives you a much fuller emotional landscape to inhabit. Here, I felt held at arm's length from characters I wanted to get closer to.

Maybe that distance is intentional. Maybe the abrupt ending is a formal choice, life doesn't wrap up neatly, and neither does this. I can appreciate that as an idea. But there's a difference between an ending that feels earned and sparse, and one that feels like the film simply ran out of things to say. This felt more like the latter. Nothing is resolved because, as far as I can tell, nothing really happened. The pregnancy hangs in the air. The argument about the headscarf hangs in the air. The absent father hangs in the air. And then the credits roll.

Two stars. Worth a watch if you're on a similar world cinema journey and you want to tick Tajikistan, but go in with tempered expectations and, if you can, find a better subtitled version than the one I had.

Rating: ★★ | Year: 2021 | Watched: 2025-09-11

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