The movie serves as Nadia Fall's feature film debut, following teenage best friends Doe (Ebada Hassan) and Muna (Safiyya Ingar) as they run away from their lives in the UK in search of more in Syria. Like most viewers, you'll get swept up in the actual journey of it all, just keen for Doe and Muna to reach their intended destination after multiple complications and hurdles.
For anyone familiar with the news cycle, the story of teenage girls running away in secret to Syria will be a recognisable one. Most notably, the UK press became hyper-focused on the reporting of Shamima Begum, who travelled to Syria in 2015 aged 15 to join Islamic State (IS).
While the film never explicitly mentions IS, the parallels are obviously clear. Rather than keeping these narratives as faceless, rid of personal stories and just simple headlines, Fall (along with writer Suhayla El-Bushra) craft such an emotional feast of a tale that it's hard not to sit up and take notice.
"First and foremost, for me, it's a film about female friendship, those really deep loves you have for your best friend growing up – and also about the teenage brain," Fall tells me.
"Usually we do because there are people around us that love us, hold us and society's on our side. Sometimes, when you don't feel like you belong or are made to feel like an outsider, you don't have that security. Young people are wonderful but are open to influence, open to taking risk, open to social media. So we did look at the push and the pull. We did look at social media. We looked at bullying, we looked at home life, we looked at indoctrination."
In the film, that's aptly demonstrated by the fact that both Doe and Muna's motivations to leave England are very different. Where Doe is going for love and a deep-rooted crush, Muna is leaning towards the escapism aspect of it all and hoping to not feel like such an outsider anymore.
"So, similarly for this, we've got so much in the news about what happened in Syria. We all have the images from back then, we have podcasts and documentaries. Ours wasn't about that. Ours is about looking at it from a young person's point of view and flipping that script," Fall says.
"Over 10 years after the story is set, we're living in a very divided society. Those in power are really relishing pitting us against each other, across different value systems or religions, ethnicities or sexualities. I think it's all fake news. I think we've got far more in common as human beings than we have differences, and the arts really remind us of that.
"It's really, really important for our health. I know I sound like a big hippie when I say this – go to the cinema, sit in communion, go to the theatre, sit together with other strangers who might be different to you and process, look and put yourself in someone else's shoes. I mean, extremism happens on all sides from different religions, different political affiliations."
It'll probably be easy for plenty of prospective Brides viewers to go into it thinking it's one thing but Fall says that's all part of it, encouraging people to watch the film and make their own conclusions. "I just think this film is much more tender than people will assume," she says, highlighting the fact that Brides certainly doesn't have all the answers.
One of the best sequences of Brides is the montage of Muna and Doe cradling their phones, swept up in social media posts and set to the backdrop of MIA's Bad Girls. Fall tells me that they used real-life footage and social media posts, the latter of which came as a surprise in terms of how many of the girls who were being indoctrinated were also talking about the "most mundane and girly things like kittens and Haribo sweets", Fall reveals.
View oEmbed on the source websiteOver the course of the film, we mainly observe the dynamics between Muna and Doe, which veer from sisterly to maternal and is a relationship that comes under a lot of stress throughout the 90 minutes. While it would've been easy to end the film on a specific and harrowing note, the film takes us back to the very first day that Doe and Muna meet in art class.
Fall says that there were "one or two people that tried to tell us to move that ending to the beginning and do it in a very chronological way", but simply put: "We didn't want that." For both Fall and El-Bushra, they wanted to end the film with some hope and redemption rather than the "pain porn" of some art that can be "too much to swallow and insurmountable".
That unforgettable female bond is one that was also reinforced by working on a big team of women, Fall explains. "Actually, most of our HODs [heads of departments] were women, which is extremely rare in film," Fall says, describing how with that came a "shorthand and a sisterhood".
As well as eliciting sympathy for these two teenage girls, we're struck in one of the final images of the film by Doe's neighbourhood being etched with graffiti that reads: "Behead all Muslims."
So how does it feel to release a film like Brides at a point in society where these topics feel more prevalent than ever?
"There is a very blatant and unapologetic stoking of the hornets' nest by certain people that have the mic at the moment; wannabe politicians, social media moguls, people with a lot of power who very deliberately put a lot at the foot of Islam and the religion."
Fall adds: "It's dangerous. It's not just dangerous for the Muslim community, it's dangerous for any community because you might be next – and that's how fascism works exactly."
Having worked with the likes of Michaela Coel and Aaron Pierre in some of their early career roles, Fall's hopes for the future revolve around platforming the "breadth and richness of stories, storytelling and people".
For now, she's got a new season of Young Vic programming to keep her incredibly busy, kicking off with Entertaining Mr Sloane. It's "very bonkers, very Marmite", she beams. If her feature film debut is anything to go by, it'll be stellar. And if the industry actually stands up and pays attention to Brides, we'll hopefully see more of Fall's on-screen directing prowess sooner rather than later.
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