In Flames

After the death of her maternal grandfather, medical student Mariam lives with her widowed mother Fariha and younger brother in Karachi. The family’s apparent inheritance quickly becomes precarious as male relatives and strangers assert claims over property, mobility, and decision-making. A motorcycle ride that first suggests romantic possibility becomes another site where consent, fear, and public danger are difficult to separate.

In Flames treats haunting as social structure. Men appear at doors, on roads, in memories, and at the edge of the frame; bureaucratic and familial systems leave the women unsure whether any threat can be named in time to stop it. Supernatural images do not replace material violence. They express what it feels like to live when harassment, grief, and economic dependence make vigilance a permanent bodily condition.

The relationship between Mariam and Fariha prevents the film from becoming a simple story of young rebellion against an old-fashioned mother. Each woman possesses knowledge the other initially misreads. Fariha’s caution is shaped by survival, while Mariam’s insistence on study and movement is not naïveté but a claim to a future. Their conflict shows how patriarchy can transmit fear between generations even when mothers are trying to protect daughters.

The film’s feminist resolution lies in recognition rather than individual conquest. Mother and daughter begin to understand that isolation is part of the threat and that testimony can interrupt it. Horror makes visible a world in which women are asked to prove danger only after harm has occurred. In Flames instead takes their apprehension seriously as knowledge, while refusing the idea that survival requires women to surrender public life.