Metacritic reviews

Mozhdah empathetically charts Nisha’s despairing acquiescence and fitful rebellions, but it’s Adil Hussain’s work making her father not entirely unsympathetic that really stands out.

"People” represents a big step up from Haq’s more modestly scaled debut, but it’s a move she handles with assurance and aplomb. She develops the father-daughter relationship visually as well as verbally, showing the action from both their perspectives.

In a resolute acknowledgment of the oppression that too many young women face at home, the film portrays the family structure as the enforcing unit of feminine docility. Here, love is another form of bondage.

It’s about hypocrisy, mistrust, and the struggle felt by second-generation immigrants everywhere. And Haq pulls no punches in depicting just how devastatingly bad things can get when a child’s mind is torn between a community built on archaic ideals and another entrenched in a present where such stringent rules prove impossible to uphold.

No matter how melodramatic the story becomes, and how much the emotions boil, What Will People Say at least tries to understand both sides of this cultural and generational divide.

Despite the subject matter, Haq is most often quite tender in her storytelling.

The film flirts with miserablism, but it counterbalances the direness of its main character's situation with moments of levity.

he performances are strong, and the situation itself presumably carries a harrowing veracity, but an ordeal is about all the movie offers. Shaking your head over and over again is the only suitable reaction.

Mozhdah, appearing in her first film, can’t match the astonishing, bone-deep understanding of psychic masochism and involuntary complicity that Nicole Kidman brought to her similarly fraught therapy sessions in "Big Little Lies" — this film isn’t operating on that rarefied level in any respect, frankly — but she does manage, in this quietly harrowing scene, to make Nisha more than just a helpless victim.

This is the second feature from Pakistani-Norwegian filmmaker Iram Haq, but unfortunately it lacks the nuance and insight of her impressively poignant yet controlled debut feature, I Am Yours.