Reviews

7.5/10 This feels like a rare find even though it's well known both in and out of LGBT+ communities. A change of pace when it comes to most gay pieces, we see something that places family first, racism close behind, and the taboo gay affair after all that.

The shady ongoings within family paired with the constant threat of fascist, anti-immigrant gangs, serves well to make sure you never let down your guard for a single second during the whole 98 minute run time.

The family dynamics are truly wonderful. It draws your attention to how out of place this Pakistani family feels in racist England, and how they have become what they had to fight through just so they could survive. Warping their own into the mindset of money and power, we see it take a toll on relationships between Omar and Johnny, and even Naseer and his mistress.

Now, I know it was probably a small budget piece done mid-80's, but some of the acting is truly awful. I love Omar as a character. I think the actor is a delight to the eyes. But his acting could've been a little more...fluent. He seems a little wary on screen but maybe he was just new to it all.

The sets are wonderful, particularly the laundrette, with such a wild change between renovations.

In all, this was on my watch list for much too long and I feel I could've learned a lot from this when I was younger. I'd recommend this to people from the LGBT+ community as it rightfully deserves its status as iconic queer cinema. I'd also recommend it to anyone else willing to watch. It's borderline educational on current political topics.

As an added sidenote, it's not very sexually explicit. It's mostly just violent.

It's so refreshing to see a film where being queer isn't the heavy burden to the characters. Being gay is just an aspect of their character.

The comical world this is set in allows for us to believe along with the crazy ideas they come up with, to believe that these adults are actually kids. You can suspend reality for the hour and a bit of runtime.

I spent every minute or so with a good laugh. The lines almost always hit, and when they want to get serious they do it well.

Rachel Sennot and Ayo Edebiri are so good together and make such a good pair. Edebiri absolutely shines. But the whole cast is fantastic.

Worthwhile watch.

There's so much frustratingly bad about this that it wholly outweighs the strengths.

For the first 65 minutes of the whole 95 minute runtime, we learn about the history of the demon, the characters, the town, the connections between current demon and the protagonist, and see almost every little detail inbetween.

Is it necessary? No.

You spend two thirds of the film watching NOTHING with heavy, tense strings played over top. It's not even visually exciting for a mass amount of it.

FINALLY there's something vaguely exciting around an hour and five minutes in. Then it's a slow trek to the end and personally, I was just begging for the film to be over.

There's a solid base. It didn't get thrown through the critique stage enough so we get way too much exposition.

Can't forget that the dialogue is so bland and weak that the actors have barely anything to work with. We have so much of the film rotating around building character, yet they're still so one dimensional.

To make it work, I think the writers need to clarify how this monster transfers, why it needs to host, and why it picks these people. They need to find a *reason* for things to be on screen, and then figure if the audience really needs the explanation. We're not that thick, we can understand nuance.

The premise of the film is lovely on its own, but it's clear they took on too much in one film. I wasn't 100% sure who the lead character was; Noah or Finn, and in the end I didn't really care. There wasn't enough time or development dedicated to building them as deeper characters. Noah is so one sided it's painful, becoming forgetful when it needs to fuel the drama in the story.

However, the worst part, and this is by no means a dig at Yiana Pandelis, was the representation of a hard-of-hearing trans man. I would've highly preferred this to just be about a hard-of-hearing woman, or if they put in the effort to actually cast a trans or GNC actor for this role. It was sad to hear the producer preach about inclusivity and the need for a range of characters to be accurately represented on screen, only to have the one trans character appallingly drawn up.

It is insulting to cast a cis woman to play a transgender man in 2020. This was sloppy. The producer at the screening claimed they spent a year teaching Pandelis full Auslan in preparation, yet in the same breath claimed it was all too difficult to cast a trans man? Ridiculous. That is lazy casting. If not a transgender MAN, then at the very least there is a nonbinary or GNC person out there for the role.

As for the scenes of Finn going through transitional stages, why are we shown the exact same, recycled imagery from American films? Australian laws heavily regulate the distribution of T, much stricter than the US. They also do not allow the first dose to be administered at home, nor do they allow self administration for many new users. In most cases, people are actively encouraged to have their doses administered by a doctor at a practice. What came up in Unsound was recycled.

It made me wonder, did Finn really need to be trans? Could Pandelis have played a lesbian, and Noah been a woman? What did we see that was new here? What does a hard-of-hearing transgender man experience different to hearing trans man? I know from personal experience that voice change is the first and most obvious effect, but if you cannot hear that change yourself, what's the most exciting part?

This film needed more time to flesh its story and characters out. It felt too rushed and much of the chemistry is beyond lacking. I really wanted to like this film. I really wanted to view the inclusivity positively, but it ended up feeling transparent, just a way for a company to say "look, we're including DIFFERENT people!" As a trans person, I felt excluded. And as it's about a trans person, I shouldn't have felt that way.