Ghost School

Bluesky

One day ten-year-old Rabia (Nazualiya Arsalan) sets out for school only to find that its gates are locked. A security guard standing in front of them tells people to clear off. No, he doesn’t know when, or if, the school will re-open. No, he doesn’t know why it closed, beyond the fact that the teacher isn’t there. All he can do is repeat the local rumour that the teacher has been possessed by an evil jinn. Some people believe that the school itself is infested with jinn.

Rabia may be a child, but she’s not stupid. Whilst she’s willing to accept that jinn could be real – three quarters of Pakistani Muslims believe in them – something about these stories doesn’t ring true. When she asks her schoolfriend what he will do now, he says his dad is going to take him to another school in the next village, but it turns out to be only for boys. Other friends think it’s great thatthere’s no more school, exhorting her to stop being boring and play. When she asks her mother for help, she is met with a shrug that signifies generations of women’s low expectations, and is expected to forget her ambitions and focus on household chores. One of those chores, however, involves going out to buy groceries, so she decides to extend her trip and undertake her own investigation.

Seemab Gul’s beautifully shot, luminous film follows the girl over the course of the day as she tracks down, one after another, various authority figures who ought to be able to tell her what’s really happening. In the process, she learns that the term ‘ghost school’ has more than one meaning, and encounters other unfamiliar words, such as ‘bribery’. She sees what happens to adults who learn to think of themselves as helpless, and comes to recognise the potentially predatory nature of the upper classes, the need to resist temptations which could carry a heavy price. Towards the end, the film shifts gears and moves into much more immediately disturbing territory with a night-time scene which, in its specificity, captures some thing universally relevant and particularly pertinent to the direction of the world today.

None of this would work, of course, without an exceptional child in the lead, and Arsalan really does have something special. Neither she nor Gul is interested in the kind of big emotion or sentiment often attached to child stars. Instead she is very focused, delivering a character whose vulnerability is clear but who is utterly certain of her purpose, her determination unsettling other children and adults alike. The effect is rather like watching a Miss Smilla or a Lisbeth Salander in larval form, but there is also a sweetness about her which suits the lighter tone of parts of the film, where she is discovering the joys of exploring the world independently, and bringing a little magic into the lives of older people who have never had her confidence.

Enriched by magical realist elements yet never straying wholly out of the realm of the believable, Ghost School shines a light on a real phenomenon which blights milliions of lives across the globe, yet, in reminding us that there are always some individuals willing to fight, finds a degree of hope.

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