INSHALLAH A BOY - Mark Reviews Movies

Inshallah a Boy, Greewich Entertainment

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 11, 2024

A widow in Jordan is not entirely or necessarily entitled to her late husband's inheritance. That's the key fact and dramatic premise of co-writer/director Amjad Al Rasheed's Inshallah a Boy, which directly challenges the country's treatment of women under its system of laws and is a compellingly grounded thriller on top of that goal.

The woman at the center of this story, written by Delphine Agut and Rula Nasser with the director, is named Nawal (Mouna Hawa), who wants to have another child with her husband. As she goes through the family's regular routine one morning, the couple's daughter Nora (Seleena Rababah) can't wake up her father. He has died in his sleep.

On top of everything else in her life—making sure her daughter gets to school, working as a caretaker for someone with Alzheimer's in a well-to-do family, paying a neighbor to watch Nora until she returns home from work—as a new widow, Nawal has a more significant problem. Her brother-in-law Rifqi (Haitham Omari) wants the final four installment payments on a pick-up truck he sold to his brother, and he wants the money now.

She simply can't afford it at the moment. With no male heir and with no official documentation that the apartment she helped to pay for is in her name, the unsympathetically stubborn Rifqi and his surviving siblings are legally entitled to half of the home. He plans to make sure they get it through the courts.

With this setup in place, the film becomes a study of increasing desperation, made all the more infuriating by way of Hawa's wholly convincing performance. She is, essentially, alone in all of this. The court can only follow the law as it was written centuries ago and remains mostly unchanged today.

Her brother Ahmad (Mohammad Al Jizawi) is either too timid or too much in agreement with the system to offer any real help, and the one person who genuinely seems interested in providing some kind of support, a physical therapist with whom she works named Hassan (Eslam Al-Awadi), is basically off-limits to her, lest anyone get the wrong idea about their relationship. Eventually, she confides in and comes up with a plan with her patient's niece Lauren (Yumna Marwan), who is pregnant by her philandering husband and wants a favor—that further reveals the state of women's rights in the country—in return.

The screenplay piles on complication after complication, question after question (We never learn why the brother-in-law wants the money so badly, and the dead husband might not have been an exception to the way so many men in the story, seen and unseen, treat women), and outrage after outrage. There's a terrible logic to the way everything proceeds in Inshallah a Boy, because everything that happens and that everyone wants is so straightforward and simple. Some might claim the story's resolution is too simplistic, too, but consider the inherent tragedy of it being the only answer to this problem.

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