Beloved

There’s a generational change taking place in the US. Interracial marriage – a thing so commonplace in many parts of the world that it doesn’t have a name – has only been fully legal there since 1967, and has been rare for most of that time, but now accounts for around a fifth of all new marriages. Nevertheless, it entails additional social pressures, and that’s before taking into account the additional difficulties facing couples where one partner is a recent immigrant. These external factors add to the internal stress experienced by the protagonists of Bishrel Mashbat’s Beloved.

The film opens with a series of famous paintings, each of which has its own comment to make on what follows. Towards the end of the sequence we see Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare, and shortly afterwards there’s a cut to a couple in bed. Anar (Iveel Mashbat) wakes up. His wife Kassy (Jana Miley) is facing away from him, her face pressed into the pillow, eyes tightly closed. He reaches across, gently strokes her, then caresses her, but she continues to sleep, or at least to give that impression. As he turns away, there’s a weary expression on his face. It’s a scene that we’ll see repeated, the following day, with him sleeping and her awake.

As we follow this couple through day to day life, you may find yourself moving from hoping that they resolve their problems to wondering what they’re doing together. There is obviously still some attraction. They compliment one another’s looks and seem to mean it. Small intimacies hint at the passion that was there once, but now they seem to be in one another’s way. Both have illicit liaisons with other people, each of which brings its own complications. He’s frustrated with his job in a bar, having left much better prospects to move to the US. When his mother gets ill, he wants to go back to Mongolia to look after her, horrified by the Western habit of outsourcing care to strangers. She is an actor, however, and doesn’t want to have to give up or limit her career. Their beautiful blue-eyed tabby cat regards them with resignation.

There are no real shouting matches here. Occasionally, voices are raised, but it’s the choice of words that does more damage. One senses that both parties are not only exploring their alternative options but are deliberately trying to sabotage what remains of the relationship, to free themselves from the temptation of going back. Still, as their hopes fall short in other areas and they each begin to recognise their own shortcomings, a new understanding develops between them.

Mashbat’s camera observes this voyeuristically, watching them from behind the edge of a doorway or from the back seat of a car. Pivotal moments are glimpsed over people’s shoulders or observed from a distance. In the second half, when the focus of the action has shifted somewhat, Mashbat presents an elegant montage whose very self-consciousness hints at the characters’ deeper problems, at the gulf between life as they imagine it and life as it is lived. The director uses this increasingly distanced technique to distract from what’s going on emotionally at key moments, so that during the film’s final sequence, when Anar and Kassy are at last ready to talk directly, it all hits at once.

Handsomely crafted and delicately delivered, Beloved approaches a familiar subject with particularity and grace. Its gentleness allow viewers room to digest the absurdity of the situation – of the disagreements which seem overwhelming but are rooted in very small things; and, perhaps, of love itself. This is not to say that love is devalued – far from it. Rather it is revealed, in its ephemerality, as something worth celebrating even if it’s only in the past.

Reviewed on: 09 Nov 2025