Bad decisions — the kind that can be, if not reversed, at least remedied — are an essential part of adolescence: lapses that teach us about our desires, our impulses, our weaknesses, our essential character, and leave us with no greater damage than a throbbing hangover or a small, smudgy tattoo. Doe and Muna, the British 15-year-olds at the center of “Brides,” either haven’t been given much slack to make the right kind of wrong choices, or haven’t permitted themselves that liberty — so when they do err, it’s in seismically reckless, potentially ruinous fashion. Clearly inspired by cases like that of Shamima Begum, the London teen who traveled in secret to Syria to become an ISIS bride, Nadia Fall‘s debut feature seems on the surface like a hot-button provocation, but it’s surprisingly humane and good-humored in its attempt to understand the individual lives behind a sensational headline issue.
Which is to say there’s little discussion of terrorism or online radicalization in “Brides,” while the word “ISIS” never appears in Suhayla El-Bushra’s lively, incident-packed screenplay. Instead, the film shows a journey akin to Begum’s wholly from the perspective of the two young, beleaguered girls going on it — who see only an escape, and not a trap. The nerviness of the underlying subject matter will get Fall’s film (premiering in Sundance’s world cinema competition) attention from distributors and programmers, while in the U.K., its profile will be further raised by the first-time filmmaker’s estimable reputation as a playwright and artistic director of the Young Vic theater. But “Brides” is first and foremost an examination of teenage female friendship in all its giddy, sometimes thorny complexity — a less head-turning pitch, perhaps, but the film is richer for it.
The year is 2014: one year before Begum’s famous flight, and two years before the Brexit vote brought roiling anti-immigrant sentiment in the U.K. fully to the surface. 15-year-olds Doe (screen newcomer Ebada Hassan) and Muna (Safiyya Ingar, from TV’s “The Witcher” and last year’s Sundance title “Layla”) have both felt the brunt of that, and specifically of Islamophobia, in different ways. Somali-born Doe emigrated to England with her mother Khadija (Yusra Warsama) when she was only three, but is still treated by others like she’s fresh off the boat. That’s in large part because, while hard-partying Khadija has socially integrated via a secular, Westernized lifestyle, her shy, quiet daughter has responded by adhering ever more devoutly and stringently to her Muslim faith — vulnerable to the social-media grooming tactics of jihadist recruiters.
By her own admission, the savvier, sassier Muna isn’t as good a Muslim as Doe — no headscarf for her, and she abandoned going to mosque some time ago — but despite the fact that she was born in Britain to Pakistani parents, she’s come to realize that her essential religious background will always render her an outsider in the small, bleak and predominantly white seaside town where they live. Their home lives are hardly more welcoming, as Doe clashes with Khadija’s abusive white boyfriend Jon (Leo Bill), while Muna regularly attracts the violent ire of her more conservative older brother. El-Bushra, also a playwright making her first foray into feature film, doesn’t crowd her script with this backstory upfront, instead parceling it out in frequent, pointedly placed flashbacks through the girls’ urgent present-tense escapade.
The audience must likewise gather the real nature of Doe and Muna’s mission on the hoof: They’re introduced in a state of giggly exhilaration on a train bound for a London airport, and the viewer’s first assumption might be that they’re stealing away on a girls-gone-wild vacation. But Istanbul, where their flight is headed, isn’t a typical spot for such hijinks, and there’s a telling anxiety beneath their excitement. Doe is strictly instructed by Muna not to answer her phone, while arrangements to meet a stranger on the other side to continue their journey sound shady enough even before the man fails to show up. Adrift in Istanbul, the girls resolve to make their own way to their ultimate destination: the Syrian border.
From this point, “Brides” takes on an engrossing, episodic road-movie form, albeit a somewhat contrived one, enabled by a pileup of mishaps including lost passports and police chases. It’s the contrasting but closely bonded performances of Hassan and Ingar as these mismatched best friends — the former poignantly recessive and reliant on the latter’s heedless, sometimes abrasive extroversion — that keep the film on track through wobblier stretches of the narrative. Ditto the vibrancy of the location shooting, which captures both the allure and the threat of the Turkish metropolis to two small-town girls who may never live so large again, though Fall’s direction can be guilty of overstatement: a mid-film needle-drop of M.I.A.’s rebel anthem “Bad Girls” is too obvious by half.
The relationship between Doe and Muna, however, never feels glib or short-cut, while their loyalty to each other isn’t taken as given merely on the basis of shared identity. Muna’s motivation for taking this extreme escape route is harder to read than Doe’s, or at least more conflicted. But the magnetic Ingar ultimately makes sense of a radiantly charismatic but lonely girl for whom friendship has become her faith — something to be trustingly followed into the unknown. One occasionally wishes for more flashes of the girls’ life in Britain together as this ride-or-die alliance takes shape, though “Brides” wouldn’t then come in at a commendably tight, volatile 93 minutes, while a late, tenderly extended scene of their first meeting tells us most of what we need to know: a formative adolescent mistake being made in real time, life-saving and life-threatening all at once.
