Rating: R | Runtime: 108 minutes
Release Date: October 31st, 2025 (USA)
Studio: Joint Venture
Director(s): Oday Rasheed
Writer(s): Avram Ludwig & Jess Jacobs

Have we crossed the border?

It’s all in the title: If You See Something. Much like the voice we hear over the subway train’s speakers during the film, the phrase’s plea for Good Samaritans has unfortunately been co-opted into a tool for witch hunts. Because it’s one thing to see something truly suspicious and call the authorities, but it’s another to let your personal bias weaponize your fears into presuming something is suspicious when it most certainly is not. “This bag is ticking” is different from “A Brown man with a bag just sat down next to me and smiled.”

But there’s another side of the phrase when considering our ability to empathize. If you see someone in pain, will you ask what’s wrong and discover how you can help or ignore them and go about your day? Moreover, which will you choose when the person struggling is a stranger rather than someone you know and love? Will you stand and watch as ICE and CBP stand outside a courtroom to ambush an immigrant engaged in the lawful process of naturalization or will you step in and fight knowing civil rights are either meant for all or none?

Based in part on director Oday Rasheed’s own asylum process and originally written by the late Avram Ludwig (two Iraqi friends who met in Baghdad before reconnecting in New York City), the film mostly deals with the second variation on the title by centering Ali’s (Adam Bakri) experience juggling his conscience with his potential new home’s bureaucracy and his American girlfriend Katie’s (Jess Jacobs, who also finished the script) reckoning with privilege, prejudice, and responsibility together. Will she help him? Can he trust her to ask?

Because these are extraordinary circumstances wherein the cost to help Ali could be as serious for Katie as it is for him. Their mutual friend Dawod (Hadi Tabbal) has been kidnapped upon his return to Iraq. He and Ali have known each other for years and his artwork is about to be displayed at the opening of Katie’s new gallery. You would assume Ali would therefore tell her what happened, but the political landscape of such a scenario adds potential “terrorism” and “treason” to the mix. There’s no telling what the ransom might fund.

Cue the bigotry that inevitably arises when obvious secrets cause those being kept in the dark to jump to conclusions. It doesn’t help when Katie’s family proves themselves to be the poster children for “Karens” around the world with their equally harmful incuriosity when it comes to loudly proclaiming their biased takes and patronizing inclusivity that tips the scale towards sycophancy at best and exploitation at worst. Her father Ward (Reed Birney) swims through each current depending on which suits his superiority at the time.

Don’t forget fear causes a similar mistrust, though. If Ali decides to pay, he places his asylum status at risk regardless of good intentions. So, not telling Katie is as much about protecting her from the repercussions of the wire being traced as the possibility of outsiders joining the circle jeopardizing the entire operation. Add the fact that the Arab friends willing to help him include a naturalized business owner (Nasser Faris’s Omar) and two illegals (Tarek Bishara’s Raad and Hend Ayoub’s Maya) and it becomes about more than just Dawod’s life.

So, Katie thinks the worst of Ali when his decision to protect her leads his admittedly shady actions to be misconstrued. And as soon as she lets those thoughts take hold in her mind, people like her father will use them to further muddy the waters. Is Ward wrong to worry about what his daughter is getting herself mixed up in? No. There are simply much better ways for him to go about expressing that love. Is Ali wrong to cut Katie out of talks of illegal activity? No. But she does deserve a voice.

If You See Something is an effectively complex drama that does well to examine the duality of, as Rasheed puts it, “acceptance and rejection.” Having Jacobs come on-board as both an actor and writer (whose interactions with Rasheed helped reshape the script’s conversations) is also a boon insofar as shining a light on the side of those affected by immigration through their love and compassion for the immigrant. Can it feel a little cringey when the camera lingers on how Ali’s nightmare affects her? Yes. But it is still valid and necessary.

Your own prejudices will therefore play a role in your enjoyment since it can be construed as “the immigrant experience through a citizen’s eyes,” but only reductively. What works so well is that Katie’s turmoil is presented in tandem with Ali’s. She neither consumes nor overshadows what proves a truly harrowing experience for him considering how much of his own freedom and future are put on the line for Dawod. Her character is allowed three-dimensionality so she doesn’t get reduced to one-dimensional emotional support.

It’s crucial that all situations dealing with the convergence of love and legality are treated with such nuance to prove how our most difficult decisions exist in the gray. Whereas Ward and Omar have the luxury of seeing Ali’s ordeal as black-and-white (a hard no to helping and a hard no to trusting an outsider, respectively), he and Katie do not because they’re no longer living in isolation. They have dedicated themselves to the other and that fact comes with its own set of rules. Because some things are worth more than a flag.

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Adam Bakri and Jess Jacobs in IF YOU SEE SOMETHING; courtesy of Joint Venture.