“The Window” is a brutal and pitiless Pakistani melodrama about primitive practices (mostly) in the provinces, the tradition of marrying women off to pay “blood money” debts.
It’s harsh and judgemental enough to be an Indian anti-Pakistani/anti-Muslim propoganda film, but the slow-to-die practices depicted here — chiefly treating women as property, property men can abuse as they see fit — is seen all over the Subcontinent.
We meet Mina (Suhaee Abro) on her wedding day, which is anything but a happy occasion. Her father (Hameed Sheikh) has sold her in marriage to a family whose youngest son died at the hands of his son, Babar (Sami Khan). The village elders will excuse that killing with this “blood money” debt.
And Farhad (Faran Tahir), the groom and monstrous older brother of the dead man, is determined to get his full, bloody value out of this blood money.
Mina is subjected to beatings and gang rapes, clocked in a single-window cell in their property on the edge of their village. As her own father has ordained “Do not bring her up again in this house” (in English and Urdu with English subtitles) to her mother, his wife, Mina’s doom seems sealed.
“You are to spend the rest of your days in this room,” Farhad spits (literally) at her. Even his sister, Deeba (Rubya Chaudhry) has limits to the pity she shows their prisoner, who is soon chained for having the temerity to try and flee this fate.
Co-writer/directors Ammar Lasani and Kanza Zia use flashbacks to tell us how it all came to this, the ill-fated lovers who tried to flee to Lahore, only to be chased down, setting up the confrontation where someone was going to die — either from “bringing shame to my family” or from trying to carry out the “traditional” rough justice sentence for such a crime.
Other flashbacks double down on the “forbidden love” causes of all this, and underscore just how poorly women are treated in the more primitive corners of this part of the world. Mina joins in on a soccer match, scores a goal, and is promptly pummeled for it by the manly men she scored on.
Mina’s pathetic plight is ham-fistedly underscored by the one creature she can speak to without judgement, “Mr. Ant,” crawling in and out of her cell.
The acting is wildly uneven here, with some players either amatuerish or uncomfortable enough acting in English as to stand apart from the rest. The explain-it-all flashbacks are paired with simplistic fantasy hallucinations, all that Mina has to cling to as her lot doesn’t improve and more and more time passes.
The graphic nature of the violence reinforces how pitiless and hopeless this situation is portrayed. Mina has no agency in any of this. Attempts to free her or remind the village of her plight are hapless and futile.
As decades of outrage, protests and international shaming do little to lessen this savagely repressive treatment, can a movie melodrama change anything? If not, one really does wonder what the point of “The Window” is.
Rating: 18+, rape, graphic violence, smoking, profanity
Cast: Suhaee Abro, Faran Tahir, Rubya Chaudhry, Sami Khan, Hameed Sheikh and Angeline Malik
Credits: Directed by Ammar Lasani and Kanza Zia, scripted by Ammar Lasani, Kanza Zia and Randy Zuniga. An Amazon Prime release.
Running time: 1:22
