Layla: Amrou Al-Kadhi’s vibrant drag fairytale

Amrou Al-Kadhi’s directorial debut Layla is a beautifully observed narrative of love, sex, gender and friendship. British Palestinian/Pakistani actor Bilal Hasna plays the title role, a drag queen from east London who must juggle the expectations of their queer community, their family’s gender norms and the mixed messages of new boyfriend Max (Louis Greatorex).

Most of the film plays out in a few London locations: the messy, cosy home Layla shares with their best friends; the muted palette of Max’s trendy but soulless work and apartment; ‘Feathers’, a fictional club facing closure; and several bus rides. These spaces are captured by a handheld camera offering both intimacy and exuberance. As Layla, Hasna captures the sense of always yearning for but never quite finding a space to call home. Films about drag often overstate the dramatic transition from the ‘real’ person behind the performance to the on-stage alter ego; under Al-Kadhi’s direction, close-ups on Layla’s face reveal something more complex. The newcomer has an extraordinary expressive range, as insecurity makes way for anger, joy shifts towards unease and back again.

Greatorex and Hasna have fabulous chemistry, even or especially when their sex scenes are infused with awkwardness and humour. As Max, Greatorex (whom I loved as the witty and cheeky but tender-hearted teen Lawrence in Sally Wainwright’s TV series Last Tango in Halifax, 2012-20) is given space for nuance, demonstrating the ambivalence of a white gay man more at home in the world of the corporate gay pride parade than the queer and trans “gay shame” party on the other end of town. But, as indicated by the title of their award-winning memoir Life as a Unicorn: A Journey from Shame to Pride and Everything in Between (2019), Al-Kadhi knows all too well that most LGBTQ+ people must wrestle with a ‘journey’ that does not always proceed in a linear direction.

Queer and trans viewers will brace themselves in anticipation of traumatic narrative turns, from the morning-after cold shoulder to parental attempts at heterosexual matchmaking. But writer-director Al-Kadhi was mentored by Russell T. Davies to make a film that is, above all, fun. In an interview for the opening of the 2024 BFI Flare festival, Al-Kadhi remarked that the film is itself “like a drag queen,” because it feels so “heightened”: while “the emotions are real”, the world the film creates “is a fairytale”. At its core, Layla is a vibrant story of a complex world that you want to spend more time in.

► Layla arrives in UK cinemas 22 November.