Sky Peals answers a pertinent question for our age of loneliness: what if Under the Skin didn’t star Scarlett Johansson but someone who blends into the background? Whereas Jonathan Glazer’s sci-fi tracks an alien who lures heterosexual men because she resembles a Hollywood A-lister in a wig, Sky Peals, an eerie, unnerving drama from Moin Hussain, spends its time with Adam (Faraz Ayub), a fast-food employee who, at his request, remains in the kitchen hidden from customers. A recluse who wonders if he’s from another planet, Adam is introverted, barely audible, and the opposite of what anyone expects from a movie lead.
Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your tastes, Adam also happens to be the focus of every scene of Sky Peals, a film that’s aggressively strange and, yes, aggressively slow. Paced like Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris except the camera hovers over drab corners of Yorkshire, Hussain’s debut feature is a hypnotic, 35mm-shot oddity that should be heralded for how it sticks to its proudly uncommercial vision. “When you’re directing a film, you’re trying to transmit what’s going on inside your head to the screen,” says the 32-year-old British-Pakistani filmmaker. “People tell me it’s really weird and heightened. But that’s how I imagine the world.”
In Hussain’s imagination, though, everyday life is truly unsettling, even without its out-of-this-world twist. Working night shifts at Sky Peals Green service station, Adam mostly escapes daylight and the typical 9-to-5 crowd, but that doesn’t explain the way time stands still, or the anguish that accompanies the tiniest of small talk. With a Pakistani father and English mother, Adam also finds that his complex identity issues deepen when his father dies in a car park. Upon studying CCTV footage, Adam speculates that his father might in fact be an extraterrestrial, which would mean that he, too, doesn’t belong to planet Earth.
Meeting me in BFI Southbank shortly before the film’s theatrical release, Hussain is noticeably more loquacious than Adam. Nevertheless, the softly spoken director acknowledges a handful of similarities, such as Adam’s mixed-race background, and the fact that he spent several years working in McDonald’s. “It’s hard work and you’re paid like shit,” says Hussain. “But I enjoyed everything being in its place, and knowing what was required of you. Like for him, the contraptions and fryers felt like the control console of the Starship Enterprise.”
Even if Sky Peals is technically sci-fi, Hussain’s approach to the genre is subtle, mood-based, and more to do with resourceful lighting than showcasing green men in prosthetics. In doing so, it literalises the alien sensation of being mixed race in Britain. “He’s convinced that he’s completely different to everyone else, and can’t see where he fits into the world around him,” says Hussain. “But it’s impossible. We’re an amalgamation of so many different things. He’s convinced his dad was an alien, and that will be the key to everything – but it’s never as simple as that.”
To that point, Adam attends his father’s funeral at a mosque, still feeling out of place amongst Muslim relatives. It isn’t just that Adam is the only person of colour amongst white work colleagues: the isolation is everywhere. “It’s the feeling of disconnection on both sides,” says Hussain. “You know you’ll never completely be within that culture. There’s loneliness in that – but it’s also exploring the positives.”
Born in London, Hussain moved to Norfolk as a teenager and directed a number of shorts outside of the capital, one of which was also set at a service station. While writing Sky Peals under its original title of Birchanger Green, Hussain knew he was touching upon aspects of autobiography, and even embraced that. “At some point, the character becomes their own person and separates themselves from you,” he says. “It takes a couple of drafts to really see them.”
Whereas British indies seem to rely on casting someone from Doctor Who or Stranger Things to secure their funding, Sky Peals had a small-enough budget that Hussain didn’t feel any pressure to land a big name. As Adam, Ayub is thus compelling as he navigates ordinary spaces with trepidation and physical discomfort; emoting with his eyes, the British-Pakistani actor commands the screen while simultaneously disappearing in front of us. It must have been a massive risk to base a film on someone who is, by definition, forgettable?
“Yeah, but that’s what fascinated me about him,” says Hussain. “He’s somebody a lot of people would look past.” Without giving too much away, the director describes the character’s arc as deliberately incremental. “At the end, he’s still working in a service station. He kind of has a friend. He’s just viewing things in a slightly different way. He’s a very isolated person, and, for him, that’s massive. When someone is that away from life, every encounter takes on such significance. Nothing happens in the film, really.” He pauses. “That’s not a great advertisement. I mean, nothing happens to him, but everything happens to him.”
Speaking to its arthouse credentials, Sky Peals premiered at the Venice Film Festival to huge acclaim, proving that British sci-fi can be daring when the right projects are greenlit. As for Hussain’s next project, he’s writing a film set in Burma during World War 2 (“under the surface, it’s a small two-hander”) and “something a bit spookier” set in a textile mill in ‘70s Yorkshire. He also considers himself to be transformed from the person who wrote the first draft of Sky Peals.
“Those emotions and feelings were obviously big in my mind,” says Hussain. “Now, I’m like: OK, there’s definitely a lot of me in Adam, but I’ve resolved some questions.” Like what? “Existential questions. Who am I? How do I fit into things? Adam realises there’s no answer to this. You just are. We’re just people muddling around, bumping into each other, and then we die. There’s something beautiful in that. Being comfortable in not having an answer is the answer – or the anti-answer.”
Sky Peals is out in UK & Irish cinemas on 9 August 2024
