If You See Something Review: Prickly Immigration Drama Is Lost in Transit

Oday Rasheed’s If You See Something is a reflection of a peculiar tension all diasporic people feel — drawn towards a new life, yet pulled by the place you’ve left behind. For Ali (Adam Bakri), an Iraqi doctor living in New York City with his gallerist girlfriend, Katie (Jess Jacobs), the world of Baghdad’s civil unrest is a distant nightmare. Yet, it is also the only place where he has family, or, seemingly, anyone who really understands him.

At its best, Rasheed’s film is a meditation on the impossible predicament of being an immigrant at the same time that urgent life calls you away from where you need to be. At other times, it feels lost in transit, spending too much time within Katie’s neoliberal family drama despite Ali’s story being a prescient one.

Jess Jacobs co-wrote the screenplay after the untimely death of the original screenwriter Avram Ludwig, but, unfortunately, her character’s arc is less compelling. The film is pulled between the inherent horrors of wading through the American immigration system and a second, lesser story about white liberalism, whereby Katie must deal with her overprotective, mildly racist father, Ward (Reed Birney). The latter feels like a distraction from the former, rather than two lines that inform and involve each other.

Ali and Katie live together but are not married. He has yet to receive his medical license in America, but that does not prevent him from saving a friend’s daughter’s life by, illegally, administering surgery to her eye. The surgery was so traumatic for all that Katie has frequent nightmares (impressively staged but jarringly placed in the runtime). Katie runs an up-and-coming gallery as they prepare to open a new exhibit. When we meet the two lovers, Ali has just gotten word that his first hearing for political asylum has been granted.

On the way to her father’s house for a family dinner with Katie’s sister, Margot (Lucy Owen) and brother-in-law Charlie (Reggie Gowland), Ali gets a series of frantic calls from his friend Salam in Baghdad. In the midst of a protest that turned deadly, their friend Dawod (Hadi Tabbal) has been kidnapped, and he is being held ransom for $250,000. In the uncomfortable position of being given this information at the same time he is supposed to be impressing his potential father-in-law, Ali opts for silence.

For the rest of the film, Ali is put in a frantic bind to cobble together an astronomical fee, while also, for unconvincing reasons, hiding that information from his partner. Stage veteran Reed Birney is probably the film’s greatest asset, but Ward is a distraction of a character. He is certainly recognizable as a father whose Boomer-era liberalism belies a prejudiced disposition, but, thematically, his presence never really folds easily into Rasheed’s larger project.

Most frustrating of all is the plot convenience of Ali and Katie not being married. Margot and Charlie are right to point out that things would be easier for them if they were, and it seems strange that they aren’t considering it as an option, even if Ali’s sentiment that he didn’t fall for her out of “convenience” is romantic. Plenty of not-yet-ready couples get married to keep someone from deportation, and the lack of this option is odd. It also feels miscalculated; if the idea is to keep Ali in limbo, so be it, but recent months have shown that ICE is not exactly shy about detaining naturalized (or even American-born) citizens, so the hesitation about marriage is not logical to the story.

Further, the film’s pacing is like molasses, and that slow-moving deliberateness sucks the tension out of the air that the script seems to want to create. The story of Ali navigating immigration as his friend is kidnapped, and the story of Ali trying to politely fit in with a racist family that mocks eating with your hands and the lack of American football in Iraq, don’t naturally go together. Each is done a disservice, and Bakri is not adept or expressive enough to lift the material.

Ultimately, the film is far too placid and noncommittal to earn its more moving climax. It’s hard to really care about these characters when their stream of decisions seems either improperly motivated or else frustratingly selfish. But there is something here. The film’s title invokes the MTA’s tattle-tale mantra of peer-to-peer policing, suggesting a cinematic project rebuking racist paranoia. But If You See Something‘s best charge is a subversion of it. “If you see something, say something.” Perhaps, for Ali, he needs to say more — for Dawod, for Katie, for himself.