'' HUM SUB '' HUH : HARROWING FILM HARVESTING

" WE - THE LUDICROUS '' : Hum Sub is an experience. An experience of the harrowing kind.

The quietness with which Hum Sub made it to cinemas misleads one to think that the film would be just as voiceless. One couldn't have been more mistaken.

The film, written by Zeeshan Junaid and Tehseen Khan and directed by Aayan Hussain, has a voice - hoarse, rumbustious, tone-deaf and anti-sectarian, but a voice nonetheless.

Hum Sub screams with the conviction of a madman who has surrendered himself to a delusion. The narrative it weaves is a spurious fallacy that cross-breeds life's very real issues with the suspension of disbelief.

The result is a blundered chimera that asks you to empathise with the absurd, amateur way the story depicts real-world problems and the way the makers - but the people at large - see them in Pakistan.

To say that the film and its storytelling approach is stupid would be an insult to stupidity - and those who make stupid bad films. And Hum Sub is bad on so many levels, cinematography, sound, abrupt starts and fades of music, the plot, the characters.

TRAFFIC - the Oscar winning Steven Soderbergh film about unconnected stories - this ain't by a longshot.

Like Traffic, stories culminate in a single day but, given the pitiful decisions the screenplay takes, one undergoes a lifetime's worth of torment in HUM SUB's two-hour running time.

While one can overlook, and perhaps even shake their head at the ludicrousness of the enterprise, one cannot, in any way, look past the insensitive, bigoted, belittling point of view of the narrative.

One understands that the filmmakers wanted to make a sweeping statement about the fallibility of man and society by holding a mirror in front of our faces in a bid to stir our souls from oblivion.

In the hands of masters, this storytelling approach could, perhaps, have been an experience.

In the hands of amateurs, it is an experience of the harrowing kind.

The World Students Society thanks Mohammed Kamran Jawaid.