‘Lali’ review: First all-Pakistani film to play Berlin is heady, tonally disjointed comedy thriller

Dir: Sarmad Sultan Khoosat. Pakistan. 2026. 116mins

A wedding in the Pakistani city of Sahiwal should be a time of celebration, but this bride and groom are marked in some way. Sajawal (Channan Hanif), the husband-to-be, has a prominent facial birthmark which has left him introverted and suspicious of a world that mocks him. And his future wife Zeba (the luminous Mamya Shajaffar) is rumoured to be cursed. This heady tonal mash-up from Sarmad Sultan Khoosat takes some wildly unexpected story swerves, not all of which are fully successful. But with its soapy sweep and unabashed melodrama, Lali is a messy but intoxicating and vividly uninhibited piece of filmmaking.

Messy but intoxicating and vividly uninhibited 

Khoosat’s bold approach and lack of creative guardrails is evident on multiple levels. The first wholly Pakistan-produced film to be selected for Berlin, where it screens in Panorama, Lali is a picture which is unafraid of defying genre conventions. Starting out with a comic tone – the film feels like a spirited Monsoon Wedding-style family drama with a touch of Final Destination foreboding – Lali morphs into something darker, taking in death, spousal abuse and what may or may not be demonic possession. And then there’s the sex. While not graphic by Western standards, the film is candid in its depictions and discussions of the newlyweds’ physical relationship, something that may impact the film’s domestic reception.

It wouldn’t be the first time that Khoosat has been involved with pictures that challenge some of the more conservative elements of the Pakistani audience. He reportedly received death threats following his previous picture, Circus of Life, and was accused of “blasphemy”. And he served as a producer on Joyland, the acclaimed drama about a relationship between an unhappily married man and a trans woman, which was condemned by conservative religious and political factions in the country. Both pictures went on to be the Pakistani submission to the International category of the Academy Awards for their respective years.

The film is divided into five sections by on-screen titles, and is most successful in its earlier, more broadly comic chapters. The wedding parade, presided over by Sajawal’s foul-mouthed but good-natured mother Sohni Ammi (Farazeh Syed), is exuberant and irreverent (the film opens with a running joke about some ill-timed and unusually stinky horse manure). Gossip about the “cursed bride” – Zeba’s three three previous fiancés died unexpectedly before she could marry them – is accompanied by pointed shots of potential health and safety violations, including guns handed out to be fired in celebration. It’s only a matter of time before the inevitable accident.

The wedding eventually takes place, largely thanks to sheer force of will on the part of Sohni Ammi. And, for a time, there is a tentative harmony, which Khoosat evokes with gorgeous use of diegetic music performed by, variously, a quartet of beefy neighbours, Sohni Ammi, Zeba and a quiet young female neighbour, Bholi (Rasti Farooq). 

It takes a while for the marriage to be consummated but soon Sajawal has an insatiable appetite for his new bride. This brings its own problems, with a coy suggestion of a UTI for Zeba. More serious is Sajawal’s growing jealousy. He takes to locking his bride in the house while he goes to work. Inevitably, the period of domestic bliss is short-lived.

It’s a visually striking work, with Khoosat favouring a saturated colour palette that heavily leans towards shades of red (the title refers to the nickname that Sajawal was given because of his red birthmark). But ultimately, it’s an uneven picture: a pivotal final scene involving a character claiming to be possessed by a djinn loses much of its power because of a lack of clarity in the storytelling.