In Camera review – young actor faces endless auditions in disorienting industry satire

A director is talking to a young British Asian actor. “You’re like the brown version of … what was his name again …?” By the end of the movie, this encounter feels familiar. We’ve watched the young actor grit his teeth through humiliating auditions. In Camera operates partly as a depressingly funny satire of box-ticking, quota-filling diversity in film and television, but with his brilliantly confident debut, film-maker Naqqash Khalid goes beyond exposing the stupid and cynical. With its dreamlike logic, looping around ideas and themes, In Camera is a disorientating film for disorienting times; opaque and enigmatic, scratching to get under the skin.

Newish-comer Nabhaan Rizwan is terrific as Aden, the actor trying to crack the industry. As a person, Aden seems lost. He’s clearly talented but he walks into auditions with a defeated air, like he knows he doesn’t have a hope in hell’s chance. Who could blame him? At one audition, up for the role of a hijacker, he’s asked to add an accent. What accent? “I don’t know, something Middle Eastern.” At another, he’s told they’re looking for “authentic Brown faces”. He seems most alive when a grieving woman hires him to play the part of her dead son popping round for dinner, a deeply unhealthy shot in the dark at healing.

But something shifts in Aden when he gets a new flatmate. Fashion stylist Conrad (Amir El-Masry) is his polar opposite, an egotistical chancer on the hustle. In this film’s logic, I wondered if Conrad might not even exist at all; perhaps he’s an alter ego invented to encourage Aden to get out there and grab life by the collar. As for Aden, his blank face is a mystery, and he’s often looking in mirrors, as if searching for something: perhaps his own identity. His other flatmate Bo (Rory Fleck Byrne) is a burnt-out junior doctor. In the era of late capitalism, have these men become their jobs?

In Camera is the kind of ambitious intelligent cinema that invites your most mulled-over theories. It will exasperate some; others will be engrossed by an intriguing movie.

• In Camera is in UK and Irish cinemas from 13 September.