Zarrar Kahn’s debut is the rare supernatural chiller that manages to be tender, thorny, political, and genuinely eerie without ever losing its grip on human stakes. Set in modern-day Karachi, In Flames plays like a séance conducted over a stack of inheritance forms: grief on one side, bureaucracy on the other, and a restless spirit muttering “sign here” in the margins. It’s bracing, beautifully observed, and—praise be—darkly funny in that exhausted, “if we don’t laugh, we are going to scream” way.
We meet Mariam (a luminous, quietly volcanic Ramesha Nawal) at the worst possible moment: the family patriarch has died, and the city’s machinery instantly begins testing how efficiently it can grind down two women newly unshielded by a man’s presence. Mariam and her mother Fariha (Bakhtawar Mazhar, magnificent in a role that requires iron and grace in equal measure) are suddenly visible in ways no one wants to be visible. Landlords remember outstanding favors, “uncles” discover new obligations, and strangers develop the supernatural ability to materialize exactly when a signature is vulnerable. If Karachi had Yelp, every opportunist here would be a “local guide.”
Kahn immediately positions the film between two kinds of hauntings: the supernatural—glimpses, whispers, shadows that don’t obey traffic laws—and the social, a creeping dread that looks uncomfortably like daily life. The result is less “boo!” and more “oh no, I know this feeling.” The horror grammar is classic—offscreen presences, rooms that seem slightly too narrow, a camera that lingers half a beat too long—yet the emotional resonance is distinctly contemporary. When Mariam sees something that shouldn’t be there, you don’t just think “ghost”; you think “witness.”
The film’s biggest coup is how it treats patriarchy as a paranormal ecosystem: a network that can pass through walls, switch off lights, and make rational people doubt their senses. Uncle Nasir (Adnan Shah Tipu, chilling without ever becoming cartoonish) isn’t a cackling villain so much as an everyday revenant of entitlement—soft-spoken at first, then suddenly everywhere, then somehow inside the house. Even the “good men” come with asterisks. Asad (Omar Javaid), a sweet, awkward love interest, embodies the potential for tenderness… and the reality that even tenderness is compromised when the world is stacked like a Jenga tower of double standards.
It would all be unbearable if Kahn didn’t lace the script with coal-black humor. A bureaucratic errand becomes a side quest from hell; a condolence visit degenerates into networking; a sympathetic neighbor declares her support in the exact tone one uses when asking to borrow sugar. The film keeps finding dry, biting laughs in the absurdity of “proper channels,” a phrase that here sounds like an incantation. You laugh, and then you feel guilty for laughing, and then the movie shows you just enough grace to laugh again.
Visually, In Flames is a knockout—intimate, precise, and textured without ostentation. The cinematography finds nervous poetry in Karachi’s contrasts: fluorescent hallways that hum like a hive; sun-bleached streets where shadows behave like rumors; cramped interiors softened by fabric, then sharpened by the camera’s shallow focus. At night, the city becomes a conspirator. Neon stutters; alleys bend; distant horns compress into a pulse. The color palette leans earthy and electric at once: rusts and umbers for the domestic sphere, sodium lamps and bruised blues for the public one. It’s not showy; it’s inhabited.
Kahn’s sound design is the film’s secret spell. This is a movie that listens—really listens—to taps, traffic, stairwells, and the hushed arithmetic of apartments. The ghosts don’t announce themselves with orchestral blasts; they smuggle themselves in through vents and intercoms and the kind of knock that sounds worried until you open the door. When the score swells, it’s careful and sparse, a heartbeat more than a melody, reminding us that dread is a rhythm as much as a feeling.
Performance-wise, there’s not a false note. Nawal gives Mariam the keen alertness of someone perpetually measuring the room’s threat level—chin lifted a fraction, breath caught between retort and retreat. When flashes of defiance break through, they land like fireworks glimpsed from behind a window grille. Mazhar’s Fariha is heartbreakingly multi-threaded: devout without dogmatism, protective yet painfully aware of the limits imposed on her protection. Watching mother and daughter negotiate the choreography of “Which of us can say this out loud?” is as thrilling as any chase scene.
Crucially, the film never pits women against each other for sport. Even when tensions flare—grief isn’t exactly a team-builder—there’s a stubborn tenderness that refuses to die. A shared cup of tea becomes a ceasefire. A scolding becomes a shield. When they laugh, however briefly, it feels like reclaiming oxygen. In a lesser film, the supernatural would overpower that bond. Here, it clarifies it.
As a genre exercise, In Flames is notably confident: it doesn’t sprint toward catharsis or hide behind exposition dump. Kahn understands that explaining a ghost ruins both the ghost and the point. The rules remain suggestive rather than schematic; the apparitions carry the logic of trauma, not a board game. When the film finally does press forward into overt horror, the staging is clean and pitiless. There’s a centerpiece sequence—no spoilers—where the camera holds wide as menace gathers from three directions at once, and it’s somehow more terrifying for being so formal. Plenty of directors can make you jump; fewer can make you scan every corner of the frame and wish you hadn’t.
The social commentary—inheritance law, property disputes, the psychic toll of everyday sexism—never feels bolted on. It’s the oxygen of the story. The horror is not a metaphor grafted onto a message; the horror is the message. When a man insists he’s only trying to help, the line lands like a cold hand on the back of your neck. When a police station scene plays out with all the soothing empathy of a customs checkpoint, you feel the floor tilt. These moments sting because they’re true; they thrill because the film has the craft to make that truth cinematic.
Dark humor returns whenever despair threatens to win. A relative’s nosy interrogation doubles as a séance for bad manners; a neighborhood gossip chain outpaces the supernatural by three blocks. The film gets mileage out of the absurd theater of propriety: everyone smiles as if their faces are rented. We’re never laughing at Mariam and Fariha—we’re laughing with them, against the world, briefly defiant.
By the end, Kahn threads a narrow path between closure and honesty. There’s relief, yes, but not amnesia. The past doesn’t stay buried; it negotiates new terms. One image in particular—simple, symmetrical, devastating—suggests that survival in a haunted world is not a matter of banishing ghosts but learning which ones you can live with. The final note isn’t triumphant; it’s resilient. In a movie like this, that’s better than triumph. It lasts longer.
If there’s a quibble, it’s that a couple of supporting men wander in from the “decent guy who means well” factory with their instruction manuals half-read. But even that feels deliberate—part of the film’s thesis that good intentions, ungirded by courage, are just softer chains.
In Flames announces Zarrar Kahn as a filmmaker with enviable control and a sharp, compassionate eye. He’s made a Karachi ghost story that feels universal without sanding off its specificity, a feminist horror that draws blood without sermonizing, and a family drama that understands the scariest thing a house can hold isn’t always a spirit—it’s a signature line.
Come for the shivers, stay for the sly wit, and leave with the unnerving sense that the knock you hear tonight might be grief, memory, or the neighbor asking a “small favor.” In this film’s world, they’re often the same thing—and all of them let themselves in.
