Sky Peals: Faraz Ayub is alienation embodied in this ghostly British service station sci-fi

The hero of Sky Peals feels unable to fit in with the world around him; Moin Hussain’s first feature is similarly an outsider within contemporary British art cinema. This is a profoundly ambivalent, fragmented narrative that resists easy resolution, that hovers on a shifting border between psychologically grounded everyday realism and science-fiction unearthliness.

Sky Peals is about a loner who suspects his father was a man who fell to Earth – and whose own life appears to be a state of perpetual free fall. The film could be read as a depiction of mental disturbance, or as an allegory of conflicted racial and cultural identity. But to pin it down to either would be to diminish its originality – not just as a portrayal of alienation, but as a vividly evoked experience of it in a broader sense.

Adam (Faraz Ayub) is the son of a white English mother and a long-absent Pakistani father. But his mother is moving south with her new partner, leaving Adam alone in an empty house that he is due to vacate; instead, he stays put, in anxious retreat, uncertain what to do next. By night, he flips burgers in the fictional Sky Peals service station, a name suggestive of the celestial signals that Adam seems to receive.

In reality, nowhere is home for him, and no place is stable: Nse Asuquo’s editing is constantly displacing Adam, and the viewer, with unnerving abruptness. At work, he hovers like a ghost among co-workers; at home, he seems stranded and dwarfed within the now empty house. But the world, or the universe, seems to want to make contact with Adam: towards the start of the film, he receives a phone message from his long-absent father Hassan, who wants to meet. Soon after, Adam learns from his uncle Hamid that Hassan has been found dead in his car. Visiting Hamid’s mosque for the funeral, Adam is a fish out of water: a stranger to the many cousins present, and clearly unfamiliar with Muslim culture and his own Pakistani origin (Hamid knows him by the name ‘Umer’).

Hamid tells Adam that Hassan just “appeared” in his family, and that Hassan himself was convinced he was from “somewhere else”, that he “wasn’t human”. What, then, would that make Adam? Musing over Hassan’s nature, Adam examines a cache of family photos and assembles his father’s clothes on the floor, like an identikit portrait of a body.

Displacement is the keynote. Hassan’s red Volvo seems to materialise of its own accord, sometimes outside Adam’s house, sometimes at the services – a site itself unearthly, like an abandoned space station. Inside this desolate edifice, at once futuristic and 20th-century archaic, the burger takeaway is just one module connected by corridors and walkways to others, including a soulless business hotel where Adam manages to mystify the participants in a New Age conscious-raising circle. The hotel is also the venue for a team-building jolly-up arranged by Adam’s new boss Jeff that is anything but jolly.

Essential to the film’s visual language is the security footage that Adam scans obsessively for contradictory evidence: Hussain’s use of CCTV imagery recalls both Andrea Arnold’s Red Road and Chris Petit’s hybrid study of surveillance culture Unrequited Love, both from 2006. Running throughout Nick Cooke’s 35mm photography are sequences that suggest glitches in the universe, or in Adam’s mind: a very DIY evocation of sensory derangement in which patches of glitter represent stars that merge with the flash of passing traffic, as seen through a Vaseline blur.

The chill of this ghostly film is heightened by touches of lugubrious comedy: the dependably engaging Steve Oram plays the unflappably upbeat Jeff, who cluelessly misreads him as “a people person”. Less convincing is the plotline in which Adam appears to make a tenuous connection with single mother Tara (Natalie Gavin), a harder-bitten new recruit at Sky Peals; the impression of rapprochement in the final shot rather suggests that Hussain has been prevailed on to give the film a more conventional closure.

The connecting thread throughout Sky Peals is the extraordinary lead performance – almost anti-performance – by Faraz Ayub. Soft-spoken, recalcitrant, at times even childlike, his Adam is all inwardness, as if folding in himself, imploding slowly into a black hole of self. His Adam may not himself be an alien, but in Ayub’s performance, he is alienation embodied.

 ► Sky Peals is in UK cinemas from 9 August