Death is inevitable, yet we spend our lives dancing around the conversation, hoping it remains an abstraction rather than a looming reality. Anwar, is a touching and thought-provoking short film directed by Fawaz Al-Matrouk that tries to delicately unwrap this complex subject with an emotionally driven story with sci-fiction elements.

It is a story about the love between a mother and her son just as much as it is a story about life, faith and humans’ unquenchable thirst for immortality.

The narrative follows Mona, played brilliantly by Kerry Bishé, a mother who chooses eternal life through science, while her son, Anwar, seeks solace in the idea of death and the afterlife. The film allows us to watch Anwar grow from a curious 8-year-old to an 18-year-old questioning his mother’s existence, and eventually to an 80-year-old on the brink of death. Mona all this while remains untouched by time or age. Her eternal presence contrasts starkly with Anwar’s inevitable mortality, highlighting the painful divide between their choices that seems to test and question their love for each other.

It is a heartbreakingly intimate portrayal of the human condition, our fear of death, our yearning for meaning, and the choices we make to hold on to what we love.

Kerry Bishé delivers an incredible performance, balancing warmth, maternal tenderness, and a mechanical-like eerie sense that makes Mona both relatable and unsettling as an android. As a mother, she loves her son but she is helpless and can only stand by and watch her son move away from her, both physically and in his thinking.
Anwar on the other hand is played by several actors who deliver convincingly in their portrayal of the character in different stages of his life.

Despite its brief 19-minute runtime, this short film manages to feel vast, spanning decades and touching on weighty philosophical questions. The pacing is deliberate, never rushing yet never losing momentum. However, it does leave you yearning for more particularly about Anwar’s time away from his mother. His journey, though hinted at, remains largely unseen, leaving us to wonder about the experiences that solidified his decision to embrace death as a natural course.

The cinematography, production design, and use of colour create a world that feels both grounded and futuristic. You see the combination of nature and the surrealism of a futuristic world well thought through and executed, just like every single detail of the film.

Beyond its sci-fi premise, Anwar is a deeply human story that wrestles with faith, the fear of being forgotten, and the sacrifices we make for the ones we love. It doesn’t try to give any answers but instead invites the viewer to do some thinking for themselves. Life and death coexist peacefully or so it seems. But if the choice was ours to make, what would we choose?

Rating: 4.5/5 stars