Film Review: The Big Sick

Kumail’s Kumail is an aspiring stand-up comedian living in Chicago who works part-time as an Uber driver, which provides a fair few gags and convenient plot devices. He’s lying to his traditional Pakistani Muslim family, who think that he’s about to start studying law. There are a succession of uneasily funny moments at weekly dinners where his mother Sharmeen (Zenobia Shroff) tries to set him up for arranged marriages with a long line of suitable women who were “just passing by”.

When he’s heckled by a (white) punter named, of course, Emily (Zoe Kazan) during his performance one evening, he approaches her after the show. They wind up getting it on while watching the original The Night Of The Living Dead, and a relationship blossoms. Months of giggly happiness pass, but when the obvious comes between them, she breaks up with him. Yet he’s the one contacted when she winds up hospitalised and in an induced coma.

Emily’s parents are notified and Kumail is forced to deal with them, and the odd-couple casting of Ray Romano (possibly on board due to the presence of producer Judd Apatow, or the lovely script) and the much smaller Holly Hunter works beautifully, as their Terry and Beth try to turn Kumail away angrily, but eventually wind up adoring him. And how could they not?

With fine work from Nanjiani and the whole cast, a sense of almost fatalistic humour in the face of despair, an in-joke or two (Kumail is continually said to be an X-Files fan, whereas in reality he was in one of the new episodes) and not quite the ending you’re expecting, this is really too subtle to qualify as hilarious or some kind of instant classic. But, nevertheless, it’s very charming and certainly close to the bone, especially when you start to wonder whether Kumail’s actual family approved of their depiction here, or if they thought it was all a bit sick.

Rated M. The Big Sick is in cinemas now