In Camera: an ambitious showbiz satire

On the set of a TV show somewhere in London, cameras are rolling. A good-looking actor (Aston McAuley) playing a greenhorn detective stands over a dead body, looking a little queasy at the staged brutality. But when the director calls cut, the young actor shrugs off his character’s humility and strides away to take a call from his manager, complaining about the show he despises and all the juicier opportunities his multi-series contract is keeping him from taking. It’s a clever beginning to Naqqash Khalid’s prickly satire – complete with a mispronounced reference to the director himself as “the Asian guy… Nassquash” shopping a hot new project round town – but it’s about to get cleverer still. The star of In Camera is not the petulant white guy whingeing about his career trajectory, but the brown-skinned ‘corpse’ lying in a pool of fake blood back on set.

Meet Aden (surely a breakout Nabhaan Rizwan). Aden is also an actor, but far from delivering stroppy ultimatums to his handlers, he’s just trying to book a gig, and to calibrate just how much pride he’s willing to swallow each time to do so. His handsome face comes slowly into focus in a mirror as he thanks the rising star, who looks right through him. Then he’s briskly hustled away by a production assistant in a manner that leaves neither us nor him under any illusions as to his place in the pecking order.

A series of unsuccessful auditions is drolly outlined in Khalid’s skewering screenplay, all their bright, hard edges of humiliation and disappointment spotlit in cinematographer Tasha Back’s shellacked images. “Would you like to try an accent?” suggests one casting agent helpfully as Aden, not for the first time it seems, goes out for the part of a generic Middle Eastern terrorist. She doesn’t say which accent, just one that’s “not from here”. Other times, Aden, usually referred to by call-time number, is expected to be able to make his teeth whiter on cue, or scorned when he asks for character motivation, or simply shunted into a room of other non-white hopefuls, jostling for space like livestock in a pen. They mutter mutinously among themselves about the one guy who gets cast all the time, and against whom they have no hope of landing a part – a precisely aimed swipe at an industry that tends to accord visible stardom to a maximum of one British-Asian actor at a time.

Aden lives with Bo (Rory Fleck Byrne) an Irish junior doctor so strung out on endless shifts that he has started to hallucinate. Bo’s tiredness also manifests in distraction: he’s friendly towards Aden but in a peripheral vision kind of way, seldom bothering to meet his eye. Then they get a third roommate, smooth-talking, self-promoting fashion consultant Conrad (a terrific Amir El-Masry), who arrives in immaculate tailoring, orders lavish sushi deliveries and enthuses about how, for minority Britons like him and Aden, it is “our time”. Inspired in part by Conrad’s unflagging swagger and in part by a disastrous side-hustle where he stands in as a surrogate son for a couple’s grief therapy, the ostensibly meek Aden starts to realise that his talents – for he is evidently very talented – could be applied more broadly. What if he approached life as a role? Could he use his facility for mirroring (as demonstrated during an acting class early on) to simply reflect success on to himself?

Khalid’s exuberantly take-no-prisoners first feature has witty, knotty notions about ethnic dis/advantage to burn. Within that furnace, however, there is the sense of certain avenues left unexplored and further fake-out twists and turns that were cut out for simplicity’s sake, but of which vestigial echoes remain. This is especially needling in Bo’s storyline, which, it is hinted through some recurring motifs in the surrogate section, might originally have been building to an ambitiously gonzo twist, but as things stand feels oddly truncated and adrift from the main thematic thrust. Still, the fizzy-acid energy of Khalid’s adventurous approach means that such stumbles are almost as fascinating to contemplate as what remains, which is twisty and unexpected enough in its own terms. That’s especially true, perhaps, in bit-player Aden’s gradual assumption of main-character energy, which feels subversive in how it plays on and then winkingly upends the racist assumption that people of colour are already too full of their own identities to be able to assume anyone else’s. It’s an example of how the movie not only boasts a surfeit of ideas, but never takes the easiest or most obvious route to develop them. As a result, it lands on unsettling conclusions that cut far deeper than the usual progressive platitudes about victimhood and bigotry.

The Bo subplot ends up making a rather neutered generational statement about professional pressures among young British men. which softens instances of the white guy’s unconscious racism by, for example, implying that when Bo mistakes Aden for Conrad, it’s partly due to exhaustion. But In Camera is at its best when it’s harder, meaner, less forgiving, when it slyly slips on a knuckleduster of righteous anger so that even its most playful punches leave a bruise.

And as Aden, the anything but reliable narrator of this deliciously tart, amoral story, Rizwan remains extraordinarily subtle, gradually pulling focus from the inequities and idiocies of the entertainment establishment on to himself. With his self-effacing manner, hesitant physicality and shy expression behind which something coldly calculating occasionally flickers, Rizwan embodies Aden’s chameleonic quality of naivety which might in fact be rigorous self-control. It makes both believable and sourly satisfying his progression from watchful observer and victim of systemic industry biases, to eventually, in an inevitable homage to OG showbiz satire All About Eve (1950), their morally compromised conqueror.

It’s such a fluid performance that there isn’t one single moment when Aden crosses the line from sympathetic, put-upon striver to something more closely resembling sociopathy. But then again, when the game is rigged, playing dirty is the only way to win. In Camera, jagged, erratic but frequently inspired, becomes one of the British film industry’s most exciting recent debuts by unleashing a withering critique of the British film industry, a deeply flawed system that forces Aden to fake it till he makes it, even while Naqqash Khalid establishes himself as the real deal.

► In Camera arrives in UK cinemas 13 September.