‘Ish’ review: Black-and-white UK debut proves lyrical study of adolescent male friendship

Dir: Imran Perretta. UK. 2025. 88mins

Imran Perretta’s fresh, resonant feature debut is about a pre-adolescent boy coming of age in a poor, worn out British provincial town. It’s about how complicated male friendships are at that age, when the thread of selfhood gets tangled up in the pressures of gang loyalty. It’s about racial and ethnic profiling and surveillance, and how where we’re from shapes how we’re seen and where we’re going.

Keenly observed story of a young male friendship

Co-written by the director together with Irish playwright and screenwriter Enda Walsh, this is, on one level, a  simple story centred on a young Asian kid and his best friend who are joined at the hip until a series of bumps in the road send them on separate paths. But as befits a filmmaker who is also a musician and visual artist who has worked across sound installations, performance and gallery shows, Ish is also a densely layered work. It’s a black-and-white English pastoral with a striking, classically-inflected instrumental soundtrack (composed by Perretta himself) that could not be further from that of the standard UK young-adult-themed movie.

After premiering in Venice Critics Week, where it picked up the Audience Award, Ish plays London’s First Feature Competition, and buzz suggests that Perretta’s debut will not be confined to the UK arthouse circuit. Subtitling may be required in English-speaking markets outside of the UK to help cope with the southern English accents and adolescent jargon, but that’s no obstacle for a film that was never going to be a popcorn prospect.

The natural energy and easy rapport of locally-cast first-time lead actors Farhan Hasnat and Yahya Kitani does much to give Ish an emotional anchor. Hasnat, who plays the titular character, projects a mixture of cheek and vulnerability that at times recalls the young Thomas Turgoose in Shane Meadows’ original cinematic This Is England. His Ish and Kitani’s Maram are both 12, though Maram’s height and pubescent ghost of a moustache make him look older.

It’s summer in Luton, north of London; school’s out and the two mates spend most of their waking hours together. The border between suburbs lined with ageing terraced housing and the countryside is permeable; suddenly they’re in a forest clearing, making a den with an old mattress, fallen branches and a tarpaulin. It’s a safe space, unsettled by the roar of a plane coming into land, its belly huge above the treetops.

Ish is good in depicting this space between childhood and adulthood. A fairground, an open-air public pool, a municipal park become dangerous, liminal spaces where Ish is forced to negotiate and recalibrate his relationship with Maram who, after being dragged into a police van for a traumatic stop-and-search, turns away from the friend who run and hid. Maram falls into the orbit of a bunch of cooler kids who are into shoplifting and drawing circles of burnt rubber on the tarmac of empty lots in revved-up cars.

Home, where the motherless Ish lives with his father, older sister (warmly played by singer-songwriter Joy Crookes) and grandma, gradually becomes a refuge. For this street-smart kid, grandma’s prayers and the old Bengali films she watches on repeat provoke curiosity and a sense of reassurance. A journey that began in restless adolescent motion, evocatively captured by DOP Jermaine Canute Edwards’ supple handheld camerawork, ends in moments of family bonding: sofa time with sis, a haircut with dad, a visit to the cemetery where mum is buried.

Footage of pedestrians filtered through police facial recognition software carries a message about surveillance and profiling that erupts when Maram is dragged into an unmarked white van and asked among other things which mosque he attends. Yet this, and another strand in which radio news reports of the war in Gaza invade the film’s rich soundscape, feel more like shoehorned artistic preoccupations than dramatic waypoints. We see Maram listening to Gaza news reports in that forest den, and are told he is Palestinian – but nothing more is made of this information.

The discordant brass chords, vocal semi-tones and handclaps of a soundtrack that wouldn’t feel out of place in a folk horror movie are just one of the elements that tells us that this is a story told from a distance, sympathetic but also elegiac. Ish is at its most trenchant, and moving, when it fully integrates this reflective adult view of a story that feels deeply personal with the joys and pains of its young protagonists. A dodgem ride or the flares and explosions of stolen fireworks in a dark wood may be metaphors of violence – but they’re also vectors of adolescent energy in this keenly observed story of a young male friendship on the brink of unravelling.