VOD film review: Arranged Marriage
Review Overview
Performances
6Plot twists
5Tonal shifts
4Matthew Turner | On 14, Feb 2023
Director: Anoop Rangi
Cast: Megha Sandhu, Kavi Raz, Jordan Williams, Balinder Johal, Saydie Dickinson, Eddie Singh, Jude Holmes, Jose Rosete, Justin Snowball
Certificate: TBC
Written and directed by Anoop Rangi, Arranged Marriage is a film that sets itself a difficult task, exploring dark and emotive themes of arranged marriage and honour killing through a satirical lens. While it’s not always successful, there are enough elements and individual moments to make this worth your while.
Set in a present-day American city, the film stars Megha Sandhu as 23-year-old Kamali Matthu, who’s just finished college and is working a retail job at Bikini World, while hanging out with her steady white boyfriend, Clive (Jordan Williams), and deciding what to do with her life. That is until she comes home one day to discover her strict, rather menacing Punjabi father (Kavi Raz) and the rest of the family have thrown an engagement party for her, and she’s expected to marry nerdy future sanitation engineer Rotoo (Jude Holmes).
Horrified, Kamali runs away from home, and Clive’s attempts to interject end in disaster. Meanwhile, her father vows that the wedding will go ahead, and he’ll stop at nothing to make it happen, up to and including murder.
Megha Sandhu has an appealing screen presence and delivers a suitably engaging central performance as Kamali, even if she tends to underplay some of the scenes that call for stronger emotion. Williams is given the more interesting part as Clive, straddling several different shades of irritating over the course of the film, even though he’s ostensibly the good guy.
The strongest supporting performance belongs to Kavi Raz as Kamila’s gangster-like dad – he has a real sense of menace that practically radiates off the screen, although he goes to the opposite end of the acting scale to Sandhu and overracts pretty much every scene. There’s also great work from Balinder Johal as “Grandmother”, whose only function is to fix various characters with a hard stare, and she does it brilliantly.
Rangi’s direction is something of a mixed bag. He creates a strong atmosphere of suspense and paranoia – largely by virtue of the everyone in the Punjabi community knowing each other, so Kamali is in constant danger of having her location revealed – and finds creative ways to shoot violent sequences (primarily through victim POV shots) without troubling a ratings board.
In addition, Rangi pulls off a couple of great twists, and even finds room for a decent CGI explosion, as well as some nicely executed shock moments. However, Rangi also struggles with the tone, with the film lurching violently from comedy to horror and back again throughout. One wrenching character turn in particular is either meant to be part of the joke, or it’s really poor scriptwriting, and it’s difficult to tell which.
That said, some of the satire hits the spot, especially when Kamali’s family all dress like American clichés in order to win favour with the investigating cops. The police themselves also fall victim to some on-the-nose skewering – Jose Rosete’s captain has an unfortunate moustache, while Justin Snowball’s detective is too busy eating the food Kamali’s family have laid on to actually ask any questions.
The film also has several insurmountable logic problems – it’s blatantly obvious who’s doing the murdering, for example. And the script ultimately isn’t sure what point it wants to make – it has the twin emotive themes of arranged marriage and honour killing, but neither of them is explored in any significant depth and the rapidly shifting plot developments in the final act are ultimately baffling.