Most of us wouldn’t want to find ourselves working the nightshift at a burger joint within a Yorkshire motorway service station, but this sort of liminal space is the only place where Adam (Faraz Ayub), the directionless hero of Moin Hussain’s ambitious and atmospheric debut Sky Peals, really feels at home. Untethered from his own life, Adam doesn’t so much not like other people as not actually notice them, most comfortable on his own as he grapples with the possibility that he might be an alien in this gentle but eerie quasi-sci-fi character study.
From the off, Adam isn’t an easy character to warm to, so quiet, slow, and passive as to barely exist within his own life (in a Kafkaesque touch, his own home is being sold with him still inside it), and he only gets more disconnected when he hears of the death of his estranged dad. The film around him is similarly glacial – even though it only runs at 90 minutes it does frustrate on occasion – but Hussain’s drip-feeding the audience of ever more hypnotic sci-fi elements keeps Sky Peals (named after the service station where Adam works) compelling, and when the grand reveals of the ending do arrive, they’re genuinely startling.
The service station itself seems to get more bizarre as time goes on, from fast food kitchens that seem to lead directly into hotel corridors to more explicitly alien imagery – the escalators have an almost organic hum to them at night, while Hussain shoots the pub gambling machines as if they were the control panels on a spaceship. It all adds up to a deeply immersive atmosphere, putting us right into the confused and often antisocial headspace of Adam, who is haunted by increasingly frequent cosmic visions and sleepwalking episodes.
It makes for an intelligent and affecting study of alienation; from one’s work or one’s family or the country one calls home. Adam’s dad was Pakistani, while his mum (played by Claire Rushbrook) is English, but Adam can’t quite seem to fit into either place, awkward at a party with his white workmates, yet no more comfortable when visiting his uncle’s mosque. It’s hardly a subtle or original metaphor, but Hussain and Ayub imbue Adam with such an honest and unflattering sense of detachment that Sky Peals can make it its own.
In a modest runtime, Hussain manages to give his audience a lot of thematic meat to chew on, while retaining the bleak sense of humour inherent in the grim location is which he has set his story. It’s a powerful calling card for a first-time filmmaker (very impressively, it never looks cheap, even though I don’t imagine it could command a particularly hefty budget), both as a statement of his obvious talent but also a deeply personal dive into his mind.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 
nice!! Sky Peals