Film Review: POLITE SOCIETY: Performances and Dialog Triumph Over Spotty Logic in Zany Mishmash [Sundance 2023]

Polite Society Review

Polite Society (2023) Film Review from the 45th Annual Sundance Film Festival, a movie directed by Nida Manzoor, starring Priya Kansara, Rita Arya, Renu Brindle, Rekha John-Cheriyan, Seraphina Beh, Ella Bruccoleri, Shona Babayemi, Akshay Khanna, and Su McLaughlin.

Strong performances, snappy retorts, and razor-sharp editing energize this bizarre genre mosaic, Polite Society.

Every once in a while, a film is so derivative it has the potential, if cleverly enough, to evolve into a subgenre of its own. When accused of stealing from this or that movie, screenwriter Dan O’Bannon said of his seminal blockbuster Alien, “I didn’t steal from anybody. I stole from everybody.”

The same may be said of Polite Society some day, a zany mishmash written and directed by Nida Manzoor. But in the meantime, we have a fast paced, familiar looking pastiche that can be enjoyed on its own terms. Ms. Manzoor manages to avoid relying too much on any single genre, cherry picking from one to the next without losing the overall thread of the story. We can recognize some echoes, as follows:

Mean Girls

The film launches into what appears to be a YA coming of age sitcom taking place in an upscale UK girls’ school. Here we find Pakistani-Brit Ria Khan losing a slap down to a senior student, Kovacs. Though a student of martial arts, she substitutes moxie for skill, and naturally, it’s not enough. Support from her school chums helps Ria turn humiliation into commiseration, and life goes on.

Bridesmaids

Ria’s older sister, Lena, is her best friend, for whom Mom and Dad have arranged a desirable marriage to a hot medical student, Selim, son of the powerful, prominent Shah Family. Ria panics at the thought of losing a sister and begins a campaign of undermining the betrothal in a series of cockamamie schemes, most of which are quite amusing, and all of which (of course) eventually backfire.

The X-Files (or 007)

Eventually, Ria bows to pressure from every side, and events get really whack-a-doodle in the vein of the Manchurian Candidate. Here goes a sort of sci-fi-horror/conspiracy theory hybrid that works at first, thanks to a really powerful scene between the penitent Ria and Ms. Shah, the future mother in law, who tips her hand and the Big Reveal gets laid bare too early.

As a result, the plot — pretty solid and suspenseful up to this point — gets a little shaky. In a nutshell, Ria stumbles on Ms. Shah’s underground lab and discovers Lena had been selected for a single attribute: she happens to have the perfect plumbing to incubate Ms. Shah’s clones. Scarier still is dutiful son Selim’s eager complicity in performing these implant procedures with near Oedipal devotion.

Real Genius

Armed with the knowledge of M-O-G’s actual agenda, Ria revives her mission with new urgency. But Ria has, in a sense, burned her bridges, thanks to her rebellious antics. But using a vaguely feminist argument, she manages to re-enlist her old school chums, and even recruits her nemesis Kovacs to her cause. They formulate a precarious plan to target the wedding ceremony itself in a last desperate gambit to save Lena while exposing Ms. Shah’s nefarious agenda. Wrinkles in the plan provide some jolts of suspense.

Sens8

Like Kala Dandekar’s nuptials in the above-captioned series, we’re treated to Lena’s fascinating wedding ceremony steeped in the culture of the Indian subcontinent. Either due to tradition, as the bride’s younger sister, or penance for having been such a brat, Ria stands out among the troupe performing a ritual folk dance — when she isn’t masterminding her sister’s abduction, that is.

Polite Society clever and well acted, remarkably solid but with a spotty logical thread, audacious enough to skip over its weaknesses. Essentially plot driven, this is closer to a sitcom than anything in style and character development. Never boring, fun, and well worthy of repeat viewings.

Rating: 8.25/10

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