Rating: NR | Runtime: 94 minutes
Release Date: November 18th, 2022 (Ireland) / May 10th, 2024 (USA)
Studio: Sky / Samuel Goldwyn Films
Director(s): Frank Berry
Writer(s): Frank Berry

My life is not where it needs to be.

Despite seeming as though it’s building to a grand emotional finale where Aisha Osagie (Letitia Wright) lays everything bare with a long-awaited account of what happened to her the night her father and brother were murdered in Nigeria, Frank Berry’s Aisha never really diverts from its otherwise quietly somber cadence. Extensively researched to approximate Ireland’s asylum experience, the film chooses to use this character as a means of uncovering the frustratingly bureaucratic thinking most governments adopt on the subject. Rather than a mouthpiece for political explosion, Aisha is a tragic amalgamation of hopes dashed.

That’s not to say the subject matter would be better served by leaning into the theatrics of a soapbox scream. Just that it seems Berry is moving in that direction with how his script keeps holding Aisha’s truth back via silence and tears. He teases the reveal in a way that guarantees our expectation of an Oscar-bait-y moment that does not come. Wright doesn’t need that showcase to put her hat in the ring considering her nuanced and heartbreaking turn is great, nonetheless. I must only question why Berry continuously puts us in a mindset for fireworks (“Put us in the room.” “You can tell me anything.” “You need to give more details”) only to have Aisha succinctly tell us what we already knew sans elaboration.

Perhaps that’s the point. That he’s explaining how European institutions demand gruesomely harrowing details before offering the decency to treat refugees as human beings rather than statistics. He probably could have done so without manipulating his audience’s anticipation too, though. Because the story succeeds on its own. It shows us the arduous process men and women like Aisha must endure to even get a chance for a visa—the time spent, abuses suffered, and the prison-like exploitation on behalf of opportunistic profiteers. It exposes how the system is built to use these refugees as cheap labor and a means for subsidies instead of saving their lives.

You have tribunals and solicitors doing all they can to prove why someone in mortal danger back home shouldn’t be afraid—people of wealth and status judging those without as a way to maintain their own place atop the food chain. And then you have someone like Conor Healy (Josh O’Connor)—an ex-con, former drug addict, security guard living with his mother—allowing for the space to see what’s happening because they too have been let down by systems meant to insulate the upper class from the lower. The comparison might be convenient and reductive, but it’s not wrong. The “other” is treated like a criminal until proven useful to those who will never treat them as an equal anyway.

We watch all the ways those with the ability to save Aisha let her down while those in as dire straits as her lend a hand. There are the real bad guys using their positions to willfully harm those in their care, the ones doing their best to assist only to find their hands tied when circumstances spiral out-of-control, and the ones with nothing to lose or gain sticking around to show Aisha that she isn’t alone even if it feels like it. Every choice in front of her (deportation, voluntary return, and even suicide) is broached and the futility of fighting is constantly weighed against the necessity to survive. It seems circuitous because it is. What matters is whether its merry-go-round consumes Aisha’s spirit or makes her stronger.

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Letitia Wright and Josh O’Connor in AISHA; courtesy of Samuel Goldwyn Films.