The Queen of My Dreams (2023)
There's something genuinely exciting happening in South Asian cinema right now, and Fawzia Mirza's The Queen of My Dreams sits right in the middle of it. I came to this one hot on the heels of watching Joyland, another film that had me completely gripped, and it's an absolute tragedy that both films share the same cruel fate: banned from cinemas in Pakistan because of their LGBTQ themes. You'd hope that theatres might be a little more progressive in 2023, but there you go. It's a shame that local audiences are being denied this kind of storytelling. What the film loses in local distribution, though, it genuinely makes up for on screen.
Because visually, this thing is a treat. The colour schemes are extraordinarily vibrant, warm and rich in a way that practically leaps off the screen and grabs you by the collar. Mirza has an eye for beauty, and she puts it to brilliant use.
The absolute highlight for me is the way Mirza uses classic Bollywood tropes and full-blown musical sequences to explore the mother's younger self and her inner world. It's a genuinely clever, visually striking device. Rather than cutting to straightforward flashbacks, we're dropped into the kind of heightened, stylised sequences that shaped the mother's own cultural imagination. It's a way of showing us not just what happened, but how she felt about it, the traditions, the values, the cultural touchstones she carried with her. It's the kind of filmmaking choice that makes you sit up a bit straighter in your seat.
And at its warmest, the film works as a lovely tribute to the culture and values we inherit from our parents, the complicated, unspoken things that pass between generations whether we want them to or not. There's real affection here for that inheritance, even when it's messy.
Which makes it all the more frustrating when the film starts pulling its punches. The LGBTQ themes, which feel so central to what the film wants to say, are handled with a certain timidity. They're there, but they're kept at arm's length. The deeper familial tension, the real uncomfortable weight of a mother-daughter relationship strained by secrecy and expectation, gets skirted around rather than confronted head-on. For a film clearly reaching for something emotionally significant, it keeps stopping just short of the difficult territory that would've made it genuinely great.
I was honestly going back and forth on my rating. There's so much here I genuinely loved, and it sits comfortably in my head as a solid, good film. But those undercooked themes matter, because they're what the story is about. And then there's the ending, which arrives so abruptly that I was left feeling a bit short-changed, like the film had more to say and simply decided not to say it. That combination of playing it safe and signing off too quickly keeps it from reaching the emotional heights it's clearly aiming for.
Three and a half stars.
The Queen of My Dreams is a gorgeous, heartfelt film with a genuinely brilliant visual language and a warmth that's hard not to respond to. Mirza is clearly a real talent. I just wish she'd trusted herself, and us, a little more with the harder stuff. A really good film, not quite a great one.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 2023 | Watched: 2026-06-10
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