Sky Peals – first-look review

The lim­i­nal space of the motor­way ser­vice sta­tion doesn’t gar­ner much atten­tion in the media. These build­ings exist out of neces­si­ty rather than desire, allow­ing dri­vers to break their jour­ney to use the loo or grab a quick bite to eat. In the school hol­i­days they are pop­u­lat­ed by har­ried-look­ing par­ents with car­sick kids and coachloads of teenagers return­ing from music fes­ti­vals, but most of the time, their clien­tele are lor­ry dri­vers and oth­er weary trav­ellers just pass­ing through. They are a sort of auto­mo­tive limbo.

Shy, awk­ward Adam Muhammed (Faraz Ayub), works the night shift in a burg­er shop at Sky Peals Ser­vices, and likes the qui­et. He delib­er­ate­ly takes the kitchen shifts so he can inter­act with as few peo­ple as pos­si­ble, and is stu­dious­ly ignor­ing the fact that his mum Don­na (Claire Rush­brook) has sold the fam­i­ly home so she can move in with her new part­ner. One night, Adam receives a voice­mail from his estranged father Has­san (Jeff Mirza) request­ing that they meet up after years of silence. He says he has some­thing to tell him. A few days lat­er, Adam gets anoth­er call, this time from his Uncle Hamid (Simon Nagra). He tells him his father has died.

Strick­en by guilt for not answer­ing the phone and now pre­oc­cu­pied with unrav­el­ling the mys­tery of who his father was, Adam ignores the cajol­ing of his moth­er to move out of the now-emp­ty house, and has to con­tend with the arrival of Jeff (Steve Oram), his aggres­sive­ly chip­per new man­ag­er at work who attempts to make Adam take a more peo­ple-ori­ent­ed role. His only ally is anoth­er new employ­ee, sin­gle mum Tara (Natal­ie Gavin), who warms to Adam despite his ten­den­cy to push peo­ple away if they attempt to get close to him.

Writer/​director Moin Hussain’s fea­ture debut is a quin­tes­sen­tial­ly British film, flit­ting between the strange ser­vice sta­tion to the hushed, melan­choly neigh­bour­hoods of sub­ur­ban Britain, com­plete with over­cast skies and one mem­o­rable orange Vol­vo estate car (the same mod­el my Mum had for most of my child­hood, which dis­plays a pleas­ing atten­tion to detail). But beyond the sense of place that Sky Peals cre­ates, both in its domes­tic set­tings and the strange, eerie space of Sky Peals ser­vices, Hus­sain cap­tures the strange­ness of being caught between two worlds, and not real­ly feel­ing a part of either. Adam is dis­tant from his moth­er despite their clear love for one anoth­er, and when he recon­nects with his uncle and cousins, he strug­gles to be a part of their world, despite them wel­com­ing him with open arms.

Wrapped into this is a nuanced neu­ro­di­ver­gent-cod­ed char­ac­ter; Adam is seen self-sooth­ing at sev­er­al points, and his dif­fi­cul­ty con­nect­ing with oth­er peo­ple and feel­ings of iso­la­tion are key traits among neu­ro­di­ver­gent indi­vid­u­als (par­tic­u­lar­ly those with autism, though it’s nev­er actu­al­ly revealed if Adam iden­ti­fies as such). As such the film shows the dif­fi­cul­ty of liv­ing with an undi­ag­nosed neu­ro­di­ver­gent con­di­tion, and how this can make one feel like an alien who has crash-land­ed on a strange and inhos­pitable plan­et. But despite Adam’s dif­fi­cul­ties, it’s impor­tant to see that he is sur­round­ed by good peo­ple who are patient with him (with the notable excep­tion of his cus­tomers) and want to help him.

A scene in which Adam unpacks some of his late father’s belong­ings is par­tic­u­lar­ly mov­ing, as he attempts to recre­ate a ver­sion of the man he didn’t real­ly know but feels a con­nec­tion to all the same. Hussain’s script dis­plays a real sense of empa­thy, deft­ly explor­ing the emo­tion­al toll of exist­ing as a mod­ern man who feels out of step with the world around him, not quite part of it despite desir­ing closeness.