Since the mid-2010s, the news media in the West have breathlessly covered the influx of migrants from the Global South. Many of us have seen the images of packed ships crossing the Mediterranean and the bodies washed up on foreign beaches. We are certainly familiar with coverage of the civil wars, ethnic cleansing, genocides, and famines that have driven people to look for safety inside the walls of North America and the European Union. Today, migration is a fact of our world, one often preyed upon by lawmakers and pundits to pass off dehumanizing rhetoric and policy. Frank Berry’s film Aisha is a quiet, effective drama that cannot be viewed outside this context, following a young woman’s fight to escape her past and make a life for herself against a system that refuses her at every turn.
Aisha, played with convincing intensity by Letitia Wright, struggles to navigate the bureaucracy of Ireland’s asylum program after fleeing her home in Nigeria. The scope of her life begins to open after falling into a hesitant friendship with a softspoken recovering addict turned security guard named Conor (Josh O’Connor), and their budding relationship grounds a story about two people alienated by an inhumane system. The asylum process requires waiting, and Aisha passes the time in her cramped shared room, working part-time at a hair salon so she can send money home to her mother. Her life moves between the two poles of uncertainty and frustration, waiting to hear back from the ministry while trying to live under the infantilizing rules of numerous refugee group homes.
Into this environment enters Conor, a meek security guard hired to work the night shift. He is timid and antsy, often looking down at his shoes before he speaks. In an early scene, he helps the police escort a family from their rooms into a van ‒ we are told they overstayed their visas. But he isn’t all bad; after showing Aisha a small kindness, he admits he didn’t imagine that deporting families would be part of his job. “So why are you talking to me,” she asks. It is a valid question, the people with authority over her are often shown to be vindictive at worst or incompetent and unhelpful at best. Instead, Conor approaches Aisha as a person equally vexed by the world around them.
O’Connor, one of the breakout stars in this year’s Challengers, delivers a decent enough performance. His characterization is especially reserved, in line with a script that doesn’t offer much material for him to work with. Conor, as a character, is a bit of a mystery. We learn in passing about his history of abuse, his battle with addiction and his stints in treatment centers. However, these moments often feel like tacked-on trauma contrived for flavor instead of lived events that inform his actions. The pair’s conversations are typical of those brought together by pure circumstance, perfectly trivial, stilted and searching. Their time together is charged with desperate optimism, like two people shouting to each other from across an impassable chasm. Both Aisha and Conor are products of institutions designed, ideally, to help the most vulnerable in society. More often than not, these systems only produce a bureaucratic indifference towards those who need help and the further alienation of those wrung through them. What they find in each other is a genuinely felt and necessary affinity, they are both people trying to make a new future for themselves.
Frank Berry’s direction is self-consciously understated, seemingly of a documentarian ethos. A title card at the film’s opening tells us the story was written in consultation with asylum seekers. As a narrative, the film is convincingly sympathetic to Aisha and the women in her situation. For all his well-meaning realism, Berry can’t seem to close the distance between his audience and his subjects. We are kept at arm’s length from Aisha and Conor, their respectfully chaste romance is sweet but too one-dimensional to come across as fully realized. What does connect is Wright’s performance as Aisha. Wright inhabits her character so fully and with such a depth of feeling that it is enough to hold the movie together.
Aisha is not an overtly political film, it is not committed to any ready-made political solution to the challenges faced by asylum seekers and refugees in Ireland or elsewhere. Aisha’s struggle is amorphous, distributed across a network of inscrutable rules, humiliations, forms, procedures and appeals that come to swallow her entire existence. Power can operate just as effectively through an administrator as it can through a boot on the neck. If the system has any output, it is in making moments of human connection and solidarity ever more challenging to come across. Aisha is a convincing enough argument that such moments might be the only hope we have when struggling against powers ambivalent to what makes us human.
Photo courtesy of Samuel Goldwyn Films
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