Stories of Westerners joining ISIS make for popular news fodder, and now one is getting the coming-of-age Sundance debut treatment. For her film debut, theater director Nadia Hill took on “Brides,” Suhayla El-Bushra’s screenplay that draws inspiration from the real-life story of a group of east London girls who ran away from home to join the Islamic State. It’s undoubtedly a rich subject. Unfortunately, “Brides” dwells too long in melodrama to fully explore its protagonists’ motivations.
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Said protagonists are Doe (newcomer Ebada Hassan) and Muna (Safiyya Ingar, “The Witcher”). They flee their crappy home lives for Syria, answering the siren call of a mysterious online influencer who claims the women of ISIS live simpler, better lives — lives in service of their community and Allah. Through this woman and a man from their hometown who’s already made the trip, Doe and Muna hope to score an escort across the Turkish-Syrian border. But when no escort shows, the girls must figure out how to make the trip themselves, a complex process that tests their resolve. All the while, flashbacks attempt to explain why the girls chose to run away to Syria.
Note the phrase “attempt to explain.” This film’s greatest weakness is its inability to plumb the depths of its characters’ emotions. There are plenty of dramatic reasons why Doe and Muna might want to leave home — parental abuse and neglect, bullying at school — but viewers need more than pat flashbacks of violent father figures and snotty peers to explain why they’d want to leave for ISIS. “Brides” goes to great lengths to show the Islamophobia that penetrates Doe and Muna’s everyday lives, and while that’s undeniably terrible, it still doesn’t explain the girls’ drastic decision. Islamophobia seems alive and well in Britain, yet very few British Muslim girls join the Islamic State. So what sets Doe and Muna apart?
There is a particularly harrowing brand of folie à deux that only teen girls can achieve. That could have made for compelling motivation if Doe and Muna had a friendship that felt close enough to sustain shared madness. Instead, these characters — and their performers — are woefully mismatched. Doe is a naïve wallflower who doesn’t even know how to buckle her airplane seatbelt; Muna is a brash bully who mocks Doe’s unworldliness. Hassan offers an understated performance, while Ingar seems more content to chew the scenery. It would be one thing if Muna were the ringleader here, but she’s not. Syria was Doe’s idea, and she’s the more devout Muslim of the two.
Such underbaked characters cannot sustain this earnest road movie. “Brides” has good bones — an interesting premise and a clearly capable director — but it’s unclear what it ultimately wants to say. “Islamophobia and ISIS are both bad” is not a thesis statement; it’s a tweet. There are richer veins to explore: the romanticization of ISIS via social media and the formidable nature of a powerless teen girl with a bruised ego. It’s too bad that “Brides” merely skims the surface when, instead, it should account for the internal war that drives its leads to seek out real-life combat. [C-]
