Our Lad

It's competent and well-meaning, but it hits every expected beat of the British immigrant-family-drama playbook—grief, faith doubt, the prodigal return—without finding anything genuinely strange or off in the material to make it hum.

Suri constructs this with real formal patience, letting silences and domestic spatial geography do the emotional work; the film sits squarely in the lineage of British realist cinema while handling the religious and cultural specificity with the kind of considered restraint that separates craft from earnestness.

The precision here is in what the film *doesn't* explain—there's a choice to let the soldier's internal estrangement exist without diagnosing it, and that restraint in performance and editing is what gives the melancholia its texture.

Rachna Suri's Our Lad is the poignant tale of one such soldier returning home from duty. Despite focusing on a specific community within British culture, Suri's 14-minute film is a relatable and powerful watch due to its universal themes of death, religion and family.

Our Lad is an understated glimpse into the life of a British Muslim soldier, that not only strives to stay true to the people and cultures it represents, but also doesn't try to ram the filmmaker's own beliefs and opinions down the viewer's throats.

Along with being an emotive and thought-provoking watch, Our Lad provides a glimpse into Muslim traditions and rituals rarely covered in more mainstream media, something the director admitted was prominent in her thoughts when making her film.