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Polite Society

Review

By Alexandrea CallaghanPublished 11 months ago 3 min read
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It seems that 2023 is another great year for movies and that is something that is greatly exciting to an aspiring filmmaker like myself. One of the truly delightful movies that we got to see this past weekend was Polite Society. A film about sisterly love, believing in yourself and inappropriate mother-son relationships.

One of the most well written parts of Polite Society is the sisterly relationship between Ria and Lena. From the beginning the fact that the girls were close was very clear. Lena helps her little sister film YouTube videos for her channel, Ria gets on her nerves and pulls her out of bed, and the girls have dance parties. They love and support each other fiercely which is really the driving factor of the story. When Lena gets caught up in an arranged marriage with someone Ria doesn’t trust, family ties are tested. They even get into a full blown sister fight. Eventually Lena realizes that her sister was just trying to protect her and they go back to being best friends.

See the other thing that I love about this movie is that it very much feels like a classic Kung Fu movie. All of the fight scenes are extremely well shot and they all fully commit. Nothing about the reactions of the characters tells the audience that these full fight scenes are at all out of place, or out of the ordinary. This is just how conflict is solved in this world. And the great thing about the way that they wrote this into the plot is that at first we the audience feel like it's just Ria living in this movie. She wants to be a stunt woman so of course everything around her, the way she experiences the world feels like a movie. So to her world and the people in it, it feels like she’s overreacting. Lena, her parents and even her friends think that she is just being dramatic and is scared of losing her sister. Which of course she is but she senses that there is more going on.

The audience gets to discover the sinister plot as Ria does, which is an excellent way to write something like this. We as the audience are also convinced that the theatrics and dramatics are just how Ria experiences the world and that maybe she is losing it a little bit. Apparently the reason that Salim wants to marry Lena is so that she can carry a baby clone of his mom…Yeah craziness. Sounds super over the top but the way they wrote it actually fit the tone of the rest of the movie perfectly.

All around the writing was great but one of my favorite parts was the way that they wrote Ria and her friends. It was so incredibly high school, it was great. Often when grown Hollywood writers try to write teenagers the dialogue is overly heavy with outdated and misused slang. And the teenage characters end up being caricatures and stereotypes. In this movie though, the teenagers actually feel like real teenagers. Down to the scene where Raheela tells them to bring back Lena…and they do. Which was obviously the dumbest option on the table but teenagers are the dumbest beings on the planet so that tracks. I love it.

Overall the movie is hilarious, action packed and extremely awesome. I know I said that I need to be harder on my grading system but it's really hard to give this movie any lower than a 9/10. It was paced perfectly, the plot was straightforward and well thought out. The characters were perfectly developed and all of the relationships make sense. The film is awesome and I could not recommend it more.

reviewpop culturemovieentertainment
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About the Creator

Alexandrea Callaghan

Certified nerd, super geek and very proud fangirl.

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