Joyland

Joyland really takes the feeling of having a life which feels so small and stretches it across a beautifully filmed canvas. It’s so achingly beautiful. It’s about a typical middle class family based in Pakistan - every member having their own internal struggle and how they continue to overlap uncomfortably. It dives deep into repression and desire and the way patriarchy boxes everyone inside - the men, the women and everyone in between. Nobody gets an easy way out, nobody has a happy ending, no one has a redemption arc - because that’s just how life works sometimes. What was really cool is how the film kept shifting from the man’s story then follows a story of him and a trans theatre starlet and towards the end it ricochets back to the wife of the same man, almost as if it’s unfolding in reverse. By the end, it feels less like a linear narrative and more like a postmortem of choices, regrets and missed chances. Joyland was beautifully suffocating, the cinematography was a pure joy to see - the way the director worked with lighting, still shots and zooms, colors. Truly a careful look at bad decisions made in a world that doesn’t make space for good ones. It lingers long after it ends.