Joyland (2022) Review: Desire and Duty in a Lahore Home

Is Joyland worth watching?

Yes. Joyland is a remarkable debut and one of the most accomplished Pakistani films in years: tender, funny, sensual and, in the end, quietly devastating. Saim Sadiq takes a premise that could have been sensational, a married man drawn to a transgender dancer, and turns it into a compassionate study of everyone the patriarchal family squeezes, men included. The main reservation is its patience: this is a slow, deliberate drama, and its emotional weight arrives gradually rather than in dramatic bursts.

What is Joyland about?

Joyland is set in a crowded joint-family household in Lahore, run by an ageing patriarch who wants nothing more than a grandson. Haider (Ali Junejo), his gentle, unemployed younger son, is married to Mumtaz (Rasti Farooq), a spirited woman who loves her job outside the home. When Haider quietly takes work as a backup dancer at an erotic dance theatre, he falls for Biba (Alina Khan), a fiercely ambitious trans performer, and the family’s carefully kept balance begins to fracture. Sarwat Gilani plays the sister-in-law whose life shows what that household expects of its women.

Sadiq directs from a script he co-wrote. The film is in Urdu and Punjabi and runs 127 minutes. It premiered at Cannes in 2022, where it won the Jury Prize in the Un Certain Regard section, and it later became Pakistan’s first film shortlisted for the Academy Award for Best International Feature, all while facing censorship battles at home.

A family portrait with no villains

What makes Joyland so moving is its refusal to sort its characters into oppressors and victims. Everyone in the house is trapped by expectations about what a man, a wife or a son should be. Haider is ill-suited to the swaggering masculinity his father prizes, Mumtaz is squeezed out of the independent life she built, and even the patriarch is shown as a lonely man enforcing rules he inherited. Sadiq’s script finds room for each of their disappointments, and that generosity makes the film’s quieter moments land with real force.

The humour is essential. Early scenes crackle with the comedy of a crowded household, the bickering, the lack of privacy and the unspoken negotiations over chores and status, and the lightness makes the gathering darkness harder to shake.

Performances of rare delicacy

Ali Junejo plays Haider as a man who barely knows what he wants, and his hesitant, inward performance is perfectly judged. Alina Khan gives Biba a hard-won pride and prickly humour that refuses to reduce her to a symbol, and the scenes between them are full of hesitation and longing. Rasti Farooq, though, may give the film’s finest performance; Mumtaz’s slow dimming, as her world contracts, is the quiet heart of the drama.

Visually, Sadiq sets the cramped, watchful interiors of the family home against the colour and charged freedom of the theatre. The contrast becomes the film’s central image of two worlds that cannot be reconciled.

Where its patience asks something of you

Joyland is not an easy watch. Its pacing is unhurried, and viewers expecting a conventional romance or a plot-driven drama may find the first hour slow. Some secondary threads, particularly around the elder brother and his wife, are sketched rather than developed. These are minor quibbles, but the film demands attention and emotional stamina in return for what it offers.

Who should watch Joyland?

It is ideal for viewers who love humane family dramas and world cinema, and for anyone interested in stories about gender, desire and duty in South Asia. At just over two hours it asks for patience. It contains sexual themes and emotionally distressing material, handled with restraint, and suits mature audiences.

If it moves you:

• Kamli, another 2022 Pakistani drama about repressed desire and women’s lives.
• Khamosh Pani, a landmark Pakistani film about a woman caught between private history and public pressure.
• Cake, a warmer, more conventional family drama with similarly strong female performances.

The verdict

Joyland is a beautifully observed, deeply humane film about the ways families love and fail each other, marked by superb performances and a director of real sensitivity. Its slow pace will not suit everyone, but it is one of the essential South Asian films of recent years.

Rating: 4.5/5