Brides: a Film Review

🎬 Brides dir. Nadia Fall (2025)

📍 saw at the cinema

★★★★★ 5/5: Reclaimed Gaze

TW: mentions of violence, racial and islamophobic slurs

An incredibly important film that is beautifully empathetic. Brides by Nadia Fall offers a tender telling of a tragedy that refuses to flatten these two teenage girls into headlines or statistics or even reducing them to cautionary tales. It felt natural for all the wrong reasons where this film offers a humanised story of the effects of islamophobia permeating UK society and online radicalisation. The film follows the friendship between two Muslim teenage girls, one who immigrated to England from Somalia as a toddler named Ferdosa “Doe” and the other named Muna, a UK born of Pakistani origin. These are just normal 15-year-old girls seeking fun, love, purpose and community. Their friendship is built on shared cultures and mutual love and understanding. We follow their daily lives as foregrounding their departure to Turkey to eventually join the Islamic State in Syria where we see endless cycles of bullying, hate and alienation from school and their homes permeating their lives. The girls’ home life is placated by chaos and physically abusive parents where Doe seeks refuge and a sense of order through her faith while Muna’s turmoil is reflected through her “disruptive” nature at school and at the mosque. They find solace in each other, a sort of safe haven from external discrimination and family expectations that allow them to live out small slivers of light youthful joy, free from exterior noise. The opening scene of them holding hands on a swing just highlights their youth and naiveté. Had they not been victims of alienating racism in their community, they could have just been normal girls playing around in their seaside town. This film is set in 2014, these girls would have been probably my age and in another life, would we have been friends? Around that time, my life revolved around my obsession with One Direction and collecting Harry Styles paraphernalia. What would have been my life had I grown up in the same social circumstances as them and had been targeted by the same algorithm? I would hope that I would have stepped up in the girls defence when witnessing their harrassment. The director flawlessly captures the daily suffering of non-White individuals in the UK, specifically in the context of the film, and channels the pain of the experiences of loneliness from never receiving true acceptance in society. In the film, you witness how numerous institutions fail these girls: how Doe is victim of physical harassment and has her hijab torn off by her white male classmate and Muna physically intervenes in her defence, yet Muna is the one who gets suspended and Doe is told to “rise above it” and “be the mature one in the situation”… Instances of macro and micro levels of racism and sexism permeate the film which work to underline the girls’ decision to run away and make the audience empathize with them. Doe and Muna share a bond over their bullying at school and home as well as they identify with the plight of their Muslim brothers and sisters shown in harsh newsreel footage. They know what it’s like to not fit in, being mocked, stared at and constantly being reminded that they’ll never truly “belong here”. The shot of Doe leaving her home and being confronted with a graffiti on the wall of the house directly opposite hers etched: “B*h*ad all Muslims” demonstrates the levels of islamophobic hate that the girls have to live with.

As the film progresses and we follow their decision to run away to Syria to be child brides, we witness their journey through Turkey to reach the border of Syria by bus where they come across various forms of hospitality from the Turkish people. The audience is forced to sit through the dread of the protagonists’ impending decision of either going through with it or returning home. Throughout the film you can’t help but root for the girls as you experience their joy of travelling to a country whose culture they feel a sort of kinship with. The film thoughtfully deals with the charged notion of “not being Muslim enough”. They encounter different forms of Islam through their travels in Turkey, and the tragedy lies in them ignoring that they have actually alread found what they are seeking which is community warmth in their lovely interactions with the Turkish people. The ticket lady who welcomes them into her home for the night but then denounces them to the police as a way of protecting them is interpreted by the girls as betrayal. What they are so desperately seeking is a feeling of community, solidarity and a sense of belonging. Something that they don’t realise is occurring right in front of them through the actions of the single father kindly accepting to drive them to the next city’s bus stop. This film does not feel like “pain porn” and rather highlights the reality of immigrant and children of immigrant’s lives.

Throughout the film you desperately wish they won't go through with their decision. When you see them getting out of the truck in Syria and being welcomed by dangerous looking men in black with machine guns, all you feel is absolute despair and sadness for the girls. However, what I most love about this film is the creators' decision to finish it not on a note of violence and despair, another statistic, but rather on a note of hope and redemption with a time jump into the past to the girls’ first meeting in art class. I consider this ending scene one of the most memorable ones I’ve watched recently. It allows the audience space to imagine “what if” scenarios of: what if a teacher had intervened properly in instances of school bullying, what if an adult had paid closer attention to their issues at home and what if their social media consumption had been monitored more closely. This leaves the audience with the (devastatingly) interesting question of who is really to blame? Is it solely the girls’ fault or do we blame social media? Whose responsibility is it, is it the school or the home? Is it a combination of all these conditions? One can think of the great Netflix series Adolescence and its depiction of the dangers of un-supervised consumption of social media for teenagers who are prone to targeted content and brainwashing. The girls in Brides were targeted with internalised media that spreads Islamophobic paranoia.

Additionally, the issue of marginalisation of women is alluded to in the film’s irony-laden title where the girls consider that their only and main purpose in life is to be a bride. When I attended the BFI panel talk with the director and writer for this film, the host likened this type of radicalisation through targeted social media content to trad wives right-wing rhetoric, which I found incredibly interesting. There is a similar thread of sedimenting this seductive idea of contemporary society is beset by decadence and consumerism. In the case of far-right tradwife rhetoric, these “unnatural” ways of living are supposedly engineered to weaken the "White race" by which becoming a tradwife is a push back method to such threats. In the case of the radicalisation of the girls in the film, they are in the search for freedom and a sense of belonging which make them prone to online grooming from radical extremists. The girls were recruited by a woman who promised them a sisterhood community that would allow them to foster a society that would allow muslims to prosper. The film offers little discussion of terrorism and rather never actually mentions the word ISIS, nor do we actually see the girls in Syria. The process of radicalisation is tenderly pieced together with the focus on the intensity of adolescent friendships. Instead, the film tackles the topic of radicalisation through images of war-torn Syria which are cleverly juxtaposed against images of far-right protests in Britain and Nigel Farage. This underlines the cyclical nature of events. Reform supporters and similar ideology are somewhat subject to similar online racist, xenophobic, sexist and homophobic propaganda that in effect radicalises them into acting violently. Their belief in this type of narrative deployed by hypocritical narcissists in power highlights the cynicism and horror of today’s political and mediatic scene. As Khan (2015) in The Guardian evokes, ‘each journey has its own beginning, but each is a quest – for meaning, identity, community; for answers.’ As the rise of racist violence targeting Muslim women who are more visible than men, this can leave women isolated and fearful seeking more radical interpretations for justice and belonging. These are very real injustices and outrages against Muslims that Western judicial institutions fail to combat. Isolation, naiveté, feelings of rightful injustice and lacking social and emotional support can work towards a distorted worldview where the Islamic State positions itself as a place of refuge where power can be reclaimed.

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★★★★★ 5/5: Reclaimed Gaze

Hope is a radical thing in which this film makes us practice our muscle of empathy.

The film resists easy condemnation of its two protagonists who are never violent or villainous. In their search to find a sense of belonging, they act as normal teens who take risks and act impulsively. The film boldly never casts judgment and offers a tender telling of female friendship built upon shared bonded trauma who are made to believe the Assad regime could become home.

To discourage women and men from joining such a movement, we need to confront how Western institutions continuously fail to heal the vicious cycles of violence, fear and hatred spun by the right-wing which feed into localised hate in communities. Disgusting vermin like Farage, Trump or Le Pen deploy such terrible racist Islamophobic rhetoric as fear-mongering tactics which lead to an increase in hate crimes. The ending as a possibility for redemption by prompting the audience to a “What if” game makes us dabble with the idea of who is really to blame. The film brilliantly tackles the level of responsibility we as Western society have in how vulnerable these teens are to online radicalisation whether it is to “red pill” talk fueling an increase in feminicides like in Adolescence or the online propaganda in Brides that feeds into the existing UK media rhetoric and social environment of Islamophobic, racist and misogynist hate that Muslim women have to deal on the daily.

I really encourage you to watch this film!