Film / Polite Society

"The gods whisper to the warrior, 'You will not withstand the fury.' The warrior whispers back, 'I am the fury!'"

— Ria Khan

Polite Society is a 2023 British action dramedy film written and directed by Nida Manzoor in her feature film debut. It stars Priya Kansara, Ritu Arya, Nimra Bucha, and Shobu Kapoor.

The film follows Ria Khan (Kansara), a British-Pakistani teenager in London whose aspirations to become a movie stuntwoman are supported only by her older sister Lena (Arya), an art school dropout. Lena films videos of Ria performing martial arts for her YouTube channel, but her dreams are regularly dismissed by her parents and mocked at school.

When Lena ends up meeting the affluent son of the local Pakistani community's matriarch, Ria is horrified to see her get engaged with him and agree to move to Singapore only a few weeks later. She grows convinced that she must save Lena from the impending traditional marriage, and attempts to pull off a daring wedding heist to get her sister back.

The film premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival on January 21, 2023, and was later released in the UK on April 7 and in the US on April 28.

Previews: Trailer

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Polite Society provides examples of:

• Action Girl:
  • Ria trains in martial arts and puts those skills to good use against the Big Bad’s thugs.
  • Lena proves to be no slouch as well; when she and Ria get into a fight halfway through the movie that quickly becomes physical, she beats her. She also gets a fight scene with Ria as Smash Sisters, and later beats up her now-ex-fiance Salim when fleeing the wedding.
• Anguished Outburst: After their fight, both Ria and Lena reach the boiling point of their emotions. Lena, in particular, goes to layers that surprise even herself. The so-far comedic scene takes a very dark turn in zero time.
  Ria: You're an artist. The sooner you get out of this Stepford wife cardigan phase, the better for everyone!
  Lena: That was the phase, Ria! This is me. [she decks Ria to the ground, then drags her to the nearest wall into a choke-hold] This is me!
  Ria: Bullshit! The Lena that I know would never give up on her art!
  Lena: Well, boo-hoo, she did!
  Ria: Why!?
  Lena: Because I'm not good enough!
  [they both take a long, anguished pause, Ria wide-eyed with disbelief and Lena close to tears now]
  Lena Happy? Is that what you want? Because I'm not good enough.
  Ria: Lena...
• Apology Gift: After being caught trying to frame Salim, Ria goes to the Shah house with a package of cupcakes to apologize to Raheela.
• As Herself: Despite being only The Voice reading a reply, Eunice Huthurt as herself answers Ria's e-mails. She's even credited simply as "Herself".
• Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other: The whole plot is built on the fact that both Ria and Lena deeply (sometimes disturbingly) care for each other, even if they also argue, fight and disappoint each other on a regular basis. Even before they fully mend their relationship, Lena points out that she's lucky to have a sister that cares so much.
• Back-to-Back Badasses: The Khan sisters do this in their fight scene against Raheela's Girl Posse, a Curb-Stomp Battle in their favor while Kicking Ass in All Her Finery.
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished:
  • Averted pretty solidly with Ria. By the time she interrupts the ceremony, she has tousled hair, a split lip, and the remains of a bloody nose from her fight with Raheela, not to mention heavy bruising around her neck from being strangled unconscious by the latter. And all of the above is even worse after their second fight.
  • Justified with Lena, who is none the worse for wear after the wedding escape besides likewise having slightly disheveled hair; she doesn't really take any direct blows during the whole sequence, so it makes sense.
• Berserk Button:
  • Ria really dislikes people — especially Kovacs, her bully — telling her she's going to be a doctor (the profession her parents are trying to push her into) instead of a stuntwoman (the career she actually wants).
  • Kovacs absolutely hates being reminded that her father is doing porridge. It's maybe only topped when people confuse his crime.
    "It was insider trading, you prick!"
• The Big Guy: After going through a Bully Turned Buddy arc, Kovacs becomes this to the girls at the wedding, as she's a head higher than everyone else and was already established as a street fighter.
• Big Sister Instinct: Ria inverting this and showing Little Sister Instinct for Lena drives the plot of the movie.
  • At first, though, it's a subversion; while Ria convinces herself that she's trying to break Salim and Lena up to protect the latter, she's finally forced to admit that they do, apparently, have a great relationship, and it's just Ria's jealousy talking because she feels he's taking her sister from her.
  • It's displayed properly by the time of the actual wedding, though, as she's figured out that the Shahs are, in fact, up to something, and spends the entirety of it trying to save Lena from them, getting beaten bloody and nearly strangled several times by Raheela in the process.
  • Both sisters show it during their Smash Sisters scene in the wedding escape, simultaneously shouting "Watch out!" at someone attacking the other from behind and linking arms to fight off both aggressors.
  • Lena also gets a moment of playing this straight during the final confrontation, when the Big Bad has Ria on the ground and is strangling her. Lena can't stop it herself because Salim has her in a choke hold, but she yells at Raheela for hitting Ria in the face, screams for her sister repeatedly, and furiously tells Raheela to get off of her.
• Break the Haughty: Ria is initially opposed to Salim's courtship and marriage of Lena entirely due to jealousy that he's taking her beloved older sister from her, and insists that the Shah family must be shady even when she's found zero evidence of it. She's also an Ungrateful Bitch to her friends and yells at them when they reasonably point out that her behavior is getting too extreme, and tries to frame Salim as a philanderer to Lena, including by bringing up his first wife. Once Salim reveals that said wife died, this quickly starts a Humiliation Conga for Ria: her parents ground her and take away all her electronics, she's alienated her friends, and Lena is understandably furious with her, briefly stops speaking to her, and tells her in a Moment of Weakness that she's not a stuntwoman (which breaks Ria so badly that she briefly plans to give up her dream of becoming one). It's only once she goes to the Shah home with the sincere intent of apologizing and mending fences with them, understanding and accepting that her behavior was wrong, that she finds the evidence she seeks against them.
• Break-Up/Make-Up Scenario:
  • Ria, in a Moment of Weakness, snaps at Clara and Alba to "fuck off" when they try to talk some sense into her about how crazy she's been acting. They rightly call her out as an Ungrateful Bitch after all the help they gave her, walk out, and sever their long-standing friendship with her. It's only after she's undergone some serious Break the Haughty, realized how not-okay her behavior was, truly apologizes to them, and tells them what she's discovered and that she needs their help that they forgive her, and once again help her in the third act at the wedding.
  • Lena is also pretty pissed at her sister's repeated meddling in her relationship with Salim, which makes things tense and leads to a (physical) fight between them. Ria then gets caught in the act of trying to smear Salim's reputation, and Lena is even more angry to the point of furiously telling her she's not a stuntwoman, straining their relationship even further. However, at the wedding, by which point Ria's learned that the Shahs really do have an Evil Plan, she visits her in her bride room and they hug. Both admit that they hate it when they fight and that they're going to miss each other once Lena moves to Singapore, and Lena reassures Ria that she'll make a great stuntwoman. This only spurs her further in her efforts to stop the wedding.
• Brick Joke: When writing her fan e-mails to Eunice Huthart, Ria always mentions in them that Eunice is probably "busy working on a Marvel or a Star War" and has no time to answer, appearing to be just a case of a fan rationalising being ignored by their idol. Ria finally gets a reply at the end of the film; in it, Eunice apologises for being silent for so long as she was, in fact, busy working on "a Marvel".
• Buffy Speak: Everyone engages in it from time to time, but Ria and her two friends, Clara and Alba, have almost all of their conversations and lines in this style.
• Bully Turned Buddy: After dealing with a school bully, Kovacs, for most of the film, Ria, Alba, and Clara get her aid when they need her car as part of the plan to save Lena. She later comes to rescue the three of them after the Big Bad locks them in Lena's room, prompting them to give her a Group Hug, and joins in the Final Battle.
• Camera Abuse: The final shot of the movie is Ria doing a spinning roundhouse kick that apparently hits the camera, as it flips on its side and immediately cuts to black.
• Cassandra Truth: By the time Ria has found actual evidence that Salim and his family are up to something shady, her earlier actions ensure that none of her family would believe her.
  • To her credit, she seems fully aware that Lena won't buy it, but it's a bit surprising that she thinks their mother will; naturally, when Ria tries to tell her in private, Fatima doesn't take her seriously, either.
  • And to their credit, once Ria profusely apologizes to her friends, makes up with them, and tells them what's going on, they also believe her.
• Chairman of the Brawl: Fatima knocks out Raheela with a chair, turning the already crazy wedding ceremony into a regular, all-out brawl.
• Chekhov's Gun: A whole bunch of seemingly-innocuous moments from the Shahs' house party become this once Ria figures out what's really going on, as we get a Once More, with Clarity flashback to them:
  • When the Khans first arrive and pass through several flowery arches, several lights are shown flashing, causing Ria to wince. They were actually taking X-ray scans of every person who arrived, specifically to observe the wombs of the young women to find the ideal host.
  • Ria's drink was taken from her by a waiter before she had a chance to consume any, odd behaviour from a high class waiter but perfectly sensible once it's revealed the drinks were a way to get saliva for DNA samples.
  • Once Ria is caught attempting to frame Salim for cheating on Lena, her parents ground her and take away all her electronics. This means that, once she goes to the Shah home to apologize, is threatened by Raheela, runs away, and finds the lab in the basement—the very evidence she was looking for that the Shahs have ulterior motives for the marriage—she doesn't have her phone on her, or anything else that would allow her to take pictures for hard evidence to show her family.
  • Also a literal example: at the wedding, Ria observes and alerts her friends that the bodyguard outside Lena's room is armed. Once Kovacs shows up and knocks the man out to save them, Ria takes the gun and uses it to disrupt the wedding and ensure she has the opportunity to say her piece and convince Lena of the truth.
• Chekhov's Skill:
  • Early in the film, Ria is shown trying to master a reverse spinning kick but always falling down at the last moment. She finally perfects it in time to administer it to Raheela in the final confrontation.
  • During their fight at the film's midpoint, Lena is shown to be not just capable of using martial arts, but also better at it than Ria. It comes in handy when they are fighting their way out of the wedding ceremony.
• Cloning Gambit: The best explanation for Salim's mother's plan to get a second chance at life by cloning herself, as there is no indication that this plan would involve actually transferring her knowledge into that clone.
• Come with Me If You Want to Live: Ria drops the line when crashing her own sister's wedding ceremony. In the background, Alba mentions she always wanted to have a chance to say that.
• Comedic Work, Serious Scene: This is a silly Wire Fu comedy with even sillier sci-fi trappings...that also contains elements of a serious relationship drama, namely in the scene after Ria and Lena have their massive fight where they unload on each other things they would never dare to say otherwise, suddenly highlighting just for a moment the themes of life expectations, unfulfilled plans and shattering the dreams of your own sibling.
• Conversational Troping:
  • Lena and Ria engage in this during their good moments, comparing various situations in their lives with movie cliches and plot devices.
  • Ria and her friends, Clara and Alba, do this on a regular basis, too, and it's implied Alba is the one that brings it up most often of them.
    [they are testing a batch of home-made chloroform on Ria]
    Alba: [concerned about the safety of this all] But chloroform? Really? Isn't that a bit... You know, a bit of a trope?
    Clara: There's a reason why tropes are tropes. It's because they work!
• Cool Big Sis: Lena, who helps Ria train to be a stuntwoman; Ria acknowledges that her initial dislike of the marriage to Salim was that he was taking Lena away from her.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Ria's fight with Kovacs at school. Ria attempts a dramatic flying kick, to which Kovacs simply grabs her leg and swings her body into a glass display case. Fight over.
• Darkest Hour: Ria's attempts to break up Lena and Salim backfire horribly, with both Lena and her best friends furious with her and refusing to speak to her, while her parents are disappointed in and punish her. On top of that, Lena's angry outburst that Ria is not a stuntwoman hurts her so badly that she nearly gives up on this dream. It's only after finding the secret lab in the Shah home basement that she gets a Heroic Second Wind.
• Dressing as the Enemy: A minor example; Ria's friends disguise themselves as the waiting staff for the wedding to infiltrate it and rescue Lena.
• Education Mama: The Khan parents are not supportive of Ria's desire to be a stuntwoman, wanting her to focus on her studies and become a doctor instead, leaving Lena as her only supporter in the family. Lena herself, meanwhile, went to art school for a while but dropped out and is now a bit adrift in life, struggling with the feeling of disappointing her parents, who did allow her to go to art school in the first place (which, as Fatima points out, some parents wouldn't have) but clearly didn't take it seriously as an aspiration for her.
• Enemy Rising Behind: Inverted. After Raheela apparently strangled Ria, she walks away from her, only for the girl to rise up and beat her up.
• Everybody Was Kung-Fu Fighting: As a Running Gag, various people are revealed as competent martial artists whenever the movie calls for an elaborate fight scene. It starts tame, with Kovacs, but quickly reaches the point where even elderly Raheela and the bridesmaids are duking it out.
• Evil Is Hammy: After revealing her true colours, Raheela is hamming the hell out of it, not even bothering to appear reasonable.
• Exact Words: Once Ria discovers that Salim was previously married and his first wife suffered Death by Childbirth, he states that the reason he got into gynecology and genealogy afterwards was to prevent something like that from happening again. As in, he wants to use his research to find a woman with a stronger, more "ideal" womb whom he can inseminate with his mom's clone, to maximize the chances of a successful birth.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Lena, when staying over at Salim's house, has a brief flash of being strapped to a table while Salim was doing something to her (or at least nearby), before she wakes up and concludes it was just a dream. Once Ria reveals to her at the wedding what's really been going on, Lena gets several more similar flashes and realizes that they're Repressed Memories, and that the Shahs were doing tests on her and her womb.
  • During Ria's Darkest Hour where her friends and sister are ignoring her and she's at her loneliest, Kovacs tries to pick a fight with her again at school, but Ria barely even acknowledges her and just walks away sadly, entirely out of character for her. Rather than looking smug at seeing her rival at such a low point or continuing to antagonize her the way many truly malicious bullies would, Kovacs just appears concerned and bummed out, hinting that she's not actually all bad and setting her up to become a Bully Turned Buddy in the third act.
• Fourth-Date Marriage: One of the few good points Ria makes in her initial attempt to sabotage Lena's and Salim's relationship is that they've only known each other for a month when they get engaged, though this is also because it becomes an official Arranged Marriage that their parents formalize after seeing how well Salim and Lena have been getting along.
• Freudian Excuse: As Raheela Shah reveals to Ria in a Just Between You and Me conversation, she received an education and had a bright future ahead of her, only for her parents to make an Arranged Marriage for her against her will that ended all of those aspirations. The only good thing to come out of it, from her view, was her son Salim. He's well aware of what his mother sacrificed for the sake of raising him, and promised to do whatever he could to make it up to her, which turns out to be inseminating a "perfect" host with her clone that would, essentially, give her a second chance at life.
• Groin Attack: In the final confrontation, Lena informs Salim that, regardless of his high opinion of her womb, he apparently has a "distinctly average" dick, and she proceeds to kick him in it multiple times.
• Halfway Plot Switch: It starts as a typical Growing Up Sucks comedy about The Glorious War of Sisterly Rivalry, then suddenly becomes an action/sci-fi comedy involving big brawl scenes, a Cloning Gambit and dance numbers.
• Heroic Second Wind:
  • Just as Ria is about to give up on her attempts to "save" Lena and her own dreams of being a stuntwoman, Salim's mother, Raheela, openly threatens her, inspiring Ria to fight back.
  • The Khan sisters nearly successfully escape the wedding, only for the Shahs to confront them at the car, with Salim holding Lena while Raheela seemingly strangles Ria at least unconscious, if not worse. But then after she leaves her lying on the ground and turns to face Lena, Ria picks herself up and proceeds to finally pull off her spinning kick to knock her out.
• He Went That Way: In the climax, Ria and Lena are able to get all of the wedding guests off their back by having Alba wear Lena's veil and deliberately run in a different direction, followed by Clara and Kovacs pretending to chase her and loudly directing the guests in that direction.
• Holding Hands: Lena and Ria run hand-in-hand during the whole wedding escape, minus the fight scenes.
• I Am the Noun: Ria invokes this in one of her stunt videos, which is supposed to end with her spinning jump kick. She at last pulls it off in the final scene of the movie.
  Ria: The gods whisper to the warrior, "You will not withstand the fury." The warrior whispers back, "I am the fury!"
• Inherently Attractive Profession: Everybody swoons over the fact that Salim, in addition to being very good-looking and charming, is a doctor who works in genetics.
• Instant Sedation: Parodied. Part of The Plan includes knocking Lena out with chloroform. She spends over a minute comically fighting with Clara and Alba as they hold the cloth to her face, but she does eventually pass out.
• Irony: Ria comes to the Shah mansion with the true intent of apologizing for her behavior towards them and attempting to make amends, but Raheela believes she once again has ulterior motives and outright threatens her, causing Ria to flee and soon find the lab in the basement. If Raheela had just taken her visit at face value—which it was—and left her alone, the Shahs' post-wedding plans for Lena would have succeeded.
• Kicking Ass in All Her Finery: The final confrontation has Ria and Lena performing their fight scenes in traditional Pakistani dresses.
• Kick Them While They Are Down: After she's knocked Salim to the ground, Lena repeatedly kicks him in the stomach. Of course, given what he'd intended to do with her, it's understandable.
• Last-Name Basis: Not uncommonly for British private schools, the students at Ria's school address each other this way. This means that we only ever hear the girls' bully (and eventual Bully Turned Buddy) addressed and referred to as "Kovacs", and don't know her first name.
• Left Hanging: We never see what happens to Fatima, Rafe, Clara, Alba, Kovacs, Salim, and Raheela, with the rest of the epilogues focusing solely on Ria and Lena once they escape the wedding. Fatima and Rafe are last seen fighting Raheela's waiting staff, and Clara, Kovacs, and Alba thinly disguised as Lena are last shown misleading the gang's pursuers in an effort for the real Lena to escape. Finally, after Raheela and Salim are taken down by Ria and Lena, the sisters make their escape with police sirens approaching. That said, it's never explicitly made known whether or not Raheela and Salim pay for their crimes, or the police simply arrived due to the gunshots Ria fired at the wedding. Presumably, though, the Khan sisters' friends and family made it out okay since they weren't the real targets, and considering that everyone else at the wedding heard about the Shahs' plans and there's evidence of it in their basement, they won't get away with it.
• Love Potion: It's never confirmed or made explicit, but The Reveal includes the heavy implication that the drinks served to the young women at the party were spiked with some kind of pheromone or chemical that made them (more) attracted to Salim, giving him the opportunity to court whichever one had the "best" womb. This is especially suggested since Ria, who never got to have her drink, was also the only girl there completely unimpressed with him.
• Mama Bear: Ultimately, once Fatima learns of Salim's real plans for Lena, she immediately launches into action against his family, knocking Raheela out with a chair while she has Lena at gunpoint and then fighting the waiting staff at the wedding to give the girls a chance to escape.
• Man Bites Man: During Ria's fight with Lena, she manages to get out of a headlock Lena puts her in by biting her arm hard enough to draw blood.
• Medical Rape and Impregnate: It turns out Salim planned to impregnate Lena with a clone of his mother, and had already done tests on her to see if it would work after drugging her. Naturally, she's outraged by all of this upon finding out.
• Moment of Weakness:
  • Ria is so frustrated at being unable to find any "dirt" on Salim that will convince Lena not to marry him, and so consumed by her jealousy, that when her friends reasonably point out that he seems to be a perfectly decent guy and maybe they should just, y'know, leave the couple alone, she snaps at them to "fuck off" if they're not willing to help her. Quite understandably, they're angry at her ungratefulness and give her the silent treatment at school for a while until she apologizes for her behavior.
  • Lena, having had way more than enough of Ria's meddling in her relationship with Salim (to the point that she tried to frame him and threw the death of his first wife in his face), has an angry outburst and tells Ria she needs to accept that Lena isn't an artist and she's not a stuntwoman, which is what truly breaks her. At the wedding, Lena apologizes for saying this and assures Ria that she still believes she'll be a great stuntwoman.
• Momma's Boy: Ria disgustedly notes that Salim is maybe a little too close to his single mother Raheela, but to the extent to which he is a momma's boy is not revealed until the midpoint of the film. It turns out that he is marrying a woman with the ideal womb who can birth Raheela's clone. After this is revealed, his previous charm is dropped in favor of acting like a petulant boy towards her.
• My Beloved Smother: Raheela to Salim; because she pretty much gave up everything she wanted in life to raise him after being forcibly married to his father, she's very possessive and protective of him, to Knight Templar Parent lengths, so he can make her dream come true of implanting her clone in another woman.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Ria was ready to concede defeat and visits the Shah home to apologize for her actions and try to mend fences. Then Raheela openly threatens Ria, reigniting her suspicions that there is reason for her to be concerned about Lena's upcoming nuptials, and in her subsequent escape attempt, Ria finds the lab in the basement and evidence that Salim is planning something involving Lena's womb as the "ideal host" for something.
• No Periods, Period: Averted. Lena gets hers while in Salim's bed, and apologizes for her bleeding all over his sheets, but he doesn't mind (it's possibly implied this resulted from the invasive medical tests he performed on her without Lena's knowledge or consent). Ria and her friends also later successfully use the excuse that Lena is suffering from "heavy flow" while trying to get access to her room multiple times.
• "Not So Different" Remark: Raheela to Ria, word-for-word, during their first fight in Lena's room. She proves to also be a very proficient martial artist, even defeating Ria in combat, though the latter manages to win their rematch.
• Orgy of Evidence: A more literal example than most. When Ria's plan to find dirt on Salim through his laptop is unsuccessful, she resorts to fabricating dirt of her own by breaking into Salim's bedroom to plant multiple used condoms that have been filled with lotion. Even looking past how nonsensical the plan is (filling the condoms to the brim with what's meant to pass for semen, tying them, and then randomly placing them about the room), Ria gets caught by Raheela and exposed in front of both the Shahs and her own family, none of whom buy it for a second.
• Overly Long Gag:
  • After running away from the wedding ceremony and defeating both Raheela and Salim, Lena keeps angrily kicking Salim down. She eventually stops, as Ria is rushing her towards escape, only to return and kick Salim some more. As she is about to leave, she turns back and gives him a few more kicks. Eventually, Ria has to drag her sister away, as she just can't stop herself, constantly returning to kick her ex more.
  • When Clara and Alba are in danger of being discovered at the wedding and are waiting for the elevator, Clara begs and begs and begs Alba to push the button. Alba returns fire just as frequently, and in just as much frustration, that she already has.
• Painful Body Waxing: Played for Drama. Raheela has Ria subjected to this on her legs as part of their "spa day", and with Ria being held down and having extremely hot wax applied to her against her will while Raheela makes overtly sinister threats, it comes off more like a torture scene. When Raheela proposes having Ria's bikini area waxed next, Ria fights off the spa workers in the room and flees.
• Papa Wolf: Downplayed compared to his wife, but Rafe Khan helps fight the waiting staff at the wedding so his daughters can flee. His efforts at fighting leave something to be desired, but the intent is there.
• Parental Issues: Kovacs has clear "daddy issues" as pointed out by Alba due to neglect and the fact he is staying at Her Majesty's pleasure for insider trading.
• Parents as People: The Khans' daughters are closer to each other than they are to their parents, because said parents have never taken either Lena's artistic aspirations nor Ria's dreams of being a stuntwoman seriously, are Education Parents to them in an attempt to give them a "better chance" at a good future, and don't listen to Ria's warnings about the Shahs no matter how many times she tries. But once Lena confirms that she's right and Salim did experiment on her, and then Raheela steals Ria's gun and plans to force Lena to sign the marriage certificate at gunpoint, Fatima goes Mama Bear by stunning her with a chair to the head to give her girls a chance to escape, and both parents are shown fighting the wedding staff members along with Ria's friends.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: In the ensuing chaos of the wedding ceremony, Alba takes Lena's veil and runs through the mansion, while Clara and Kovacs incite the crowd by addressing her as Lena. It's all effective enough to trick the people chasing the bride into following them.
• Pre-Asskicking One-Liner: "I am the fury." While it had previously been used in several failed attempts by Ria to do her spinning kick, she says it again to Raheela after she tries telling her what she is — a "silly girl with silly ideas" and a "tragic waste of human life" — and before delivering a perfect spinning kick to Raheela's head.
• Preemptive Apology: Once Alba and Clara get alone in a room with Lena at the wedding, them chloroforming her plays out thusly:
  Alba: Massively sorry about this.
  Lena: About what?
  Clara: This! [administers chloroform]
• Precision F-Strike: Ria tells Alba and Clara to "fuck off" when they feel she is going too far in her plans by wanting to plant dirt on Salim.
• Prisoner Exchange: Alba and Clara successfully knock Lena unconscious and manage to sneak her out of her room, but then Ria is defeated and captured by Raheela, forcing them to go back to exchange Lena for Ria.
• Professor Guinea Pig: While not a professor herself, at one point Ria has chloroform tested on herself so that she can be sure how long Lena will be unconscious.
• Psychological Projection: Ria seems way more fixated on Lena becoming an artist than Lena is herself, to the latter's exasperation and frustration, as she left art school and eventually angrily admits that this was because she's just not good enough to cut it. At the wedding, Ria confesses that this was partially due to Big Sister Worship; the idea of Lena not achieving her former dream of being an artist upset her because, if Lena couldn't succeed at her dreams, Ria felt she had little chance of fulfilling her own dream of becoming a stuntwoman.
• Punctuated Pounding:
  • Done twice in Ria and Lena's fight.
    • Lena smashes Ria's face into a family photo on the wall:
      "I! TOLD! YOU! TO! PISS! OFF!"
    • Ria later returns the favor a bit by smashing the back of Lena's head into a mirror once she gets her in a headlock:
      "The sooner you get out of this STEPFORD Wife — CARDIGAN phase, the better for everyone!"
  • Near the end, Lena finally gets to have her word with Salim once the truth comes out, repeatedly kicking him while he's on the ground.
    "You drugged me! You did tests on me! And you tried — to shove — your MUM in me!"
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Raheela gives one to Ria while strangling her in their final fight, calling her "a silly girl with silly ideas" and concluding by saying she's "utterly unremarkable" (meaning it as a contrast to herself, as Raheela fancies herself an extraordinary woman with stolen potential) and a "waste of human life". Ria, Determinator that she is, staggers back to her feet and delivers a fantastic Shut Up, Hannibal!.
• Repressed Memories: When Ria confronts Lena and Salim at the wedding and talks about the tests on Lena's womb, Lena remembers what she believed were just dreams of being tested in a lab.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons:
  • Ria is eventually forced to admit that she just doesn't want Lena to marry Salim out of jealousy at losing her sister, rather than anything wrong with the man himself. Soon after, though, she discovers that the Shahs are in fact shady, and Lena definitely shouldn't marry him.
  • Even once Ria has confirmed that something shady is going on involving planting something in Lena's uterus, she and her friends think it's some kind of aliens or superbabies or some such. Raheela eventually reveals that she and Salim want to implant a clone of herself, to essentially give her a "do-over" at life.
• Runaway Bride: Lena becomes this once she learns of Salim's plans for her at the ceremony, courtesy of Ria, and the two sisters flee from the wedding together.
• Saying Too Much: Salim ultimately confirms Ria's claim when he starts talking about Lena's womb during the wedding.
• Secret Handshake: Ria has a three-way one with her two best friends that they do twice in the film. Both times, other students walk in the room right as they're finishing and make fun of them, to which they immediately (and profanely) tell them off.
• She Cleans Up Nicely:
  • Lena is a slob who spends most of her time in hoodies and track suits. One of the things that makes Ria think something is off about her is that she suddenly starts to dress up nicely after meeting Salim, and she obviously ends up looking gorgeous for her wedding.
  • Brought up verbatim by Raheela toward Ria and her wedding reception costume.
• Shout-Out:
  • The first chapter of the film is called "A Tale of Two Sisters".
  • Ria's Secret Handshake with Alba and Clara ends with them doing a dramatic Matrix-style Bullet Time dodge in fake slow-mo.
  • Ria references The Stepford Wives to describe Lena's relationship with Salim.
  • Ria's dress for the wedding is one to the "Maar Daala" dance scene from Devdas, which she performs a one-to-one recreation of.
• "Shut Up!" Gunshot: Ria takes the pistol from the guard in front of Lena's door and proceeds to use it to stop the wedding ceremony by shooting straight up. Each time the crowd starts moving or anyone interrupts her, she fires another shot in the air.
• Shut Up, Hannibal!: In the final confrontation, Ria is strangled nearly to death by Raheela, who gives her a cold "Reason You Suck" Speech about how she's "a tragic waste of human life". Instead of staying down or letting it get to her, Ria gets back up, responds with her Catchphrase, "I am the fury!", and finally perfects her spinning kick to smash Raheela upside the head and defeat her.
• Smash Sisters: In a literal example, Ria and Lena get a fight scene together when fleeing the wedding and fending off Raheela's attending friends that she sics on them. Also doubles as Back-to-Back Badasses.
• Soft Glass: Ria gets her body thrown into the glass of a nearby display case at school, only being stunned briefly and not getting cut at all. For comparison, when she and Lena fight later on, Ria ends up with a bloody forehead after banging into a simple photo frame.
• Stylistic Suck: All of the Wire Fu is intentionally made obvious.
• Subverted Suspicion Aesop: Ria obsesses over Salim being a bad guy, but the more she digs into him, the cleaner he looks — until she outright tries to fabricate dirt on him, which horribly backfires on her. But in the end, it turns out Salim and Raheela were always planning to use Lena for their Cloning Gambit.
• Sweet Polly Oliver: As part of Ria's plan to hack into Salim's laptop while he's at the gym, her and Alba disguise themselves as men using baggy clothes, hats, fake facial hair, and a pronounced swaggering walk. They do so to sneak into the men's changing room and break into Salim's locker to respectively steal and return the laptop.
• Those Two Guys: Alba and Clara, Ria's friends from school. They constantly discuss and lampshade the events around them, often in a Conversational Troping style.
• Tomboy with a Girly Streak: Ria. She trains martial arts, dreams about being a stuntwoman, dresses like a boy and has very "unladylike" mannerisms, all while swearing like a sailor... but still watches Bollywood movies (between the martial arts ones, that is) and can dance elaborate choreography as if nothing.
• Too Hungry to Be Polite:
  • Lena is a messy eater in general, owed in part to her starting the film in a depression after dropping out of art school, but her introduction scene has her eating a whole fried chicken with her bare hands, all while walking down a street.
  • After fighting their way to freedom and escaping the wedding, Lena notes that she's hungry, and she and Ria make their first stop at a burger joint, where they messily pig out on burgers, fries and milkshakes.
• Trailers Always Spoil: The trailer has several scenes that show off Raheela's villainous nature and the climactic wedding fight, when the movie itself starts out ambiguous as to whether the Shahs are really evil or not.
• Tropes Are Not Bad: Discussed by Alba and Clara: "There's a reason why tropes are tropes. It's because they work!"
• Trouble Entendre: A dance version. Ria, while performing her dance at Lena's wedding (which she does ahead of schedule to distract the mothers so her friends can get to Lena), incorporates several gestures that, to most of the partygoers, have no significant meaning, but are directed at the Shahs. Most notably, she makes a "gun to the temple" motion while looking right at Salim (who clearly gets it), and ends the performance with a "Bring It" hand wave at Raheela.
• Ungrateful Bitch: Despite all that Alba and Clara do to help Ria get some dirt on Salim, they're not able to find anything, and Ria instead decides to plant evidence to smear him. Once they tell her they think she's going too far, she angrily tells them to fuck off, and they understandably call her out for being this and storm out of the house, giving her the cold shoulder at school until she apologizes later.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Played for Laughs. At one point, Ria and Lena have a serious fight that ends with both receiving injuries (a lot of bruises, a few minor cuts and one smashed forehead), Ria's room and the door to it being demolished, and a lot of ruckus being made in the process. The scene cuts to their parents in the middle of the fight, who calmly sit in the kitchen listening to it all indifferently, suggesting this isn't the first time something like this has happened.
  [after the fight is over and the noise goes down]
  Fatima: [in a calm tone, calling from the distance] Girls, I don't care who started it. Just clean it up and get down here.
  Lena: Coming, Ma!
• Use Your Head: Lena knocks Salim down after headbutting him. While wearing an elaborate matha patti headpiece on her own forehead.
• Villain Ball: Raheela reveals her true evil colors to Ria after the latter has already conceded that there apparently isn't anything wrong with the wedding beyond Ria losing her sister. If Raheela had just kept a normal demeanor until after the wedding, her plan would have succeeded.
• The Voice: Stuntwoman Eunice Huthart, Ria's idol, makes most of her appearances throughout the film in a poster on Ria's wall as she writes multiple unsolicited (and unanswered) emails to her. She also appears at the very end, having finally sent Ria an email, which we hear in voiceover, with the real Eunice's voice.
• Voiceover Letter: Eunice Huthart's first email in response to Ria is read aloud as she and Lena read it off her phone, with the real Eunice providing the voice.
• We Need a Distraction:
  • At the gym, Salim starts to return to his locker after a workout while Clara and Alba are still hacking into his laptop, so Ria makes her presence known and "just happens to bump into him there", having a (fairly awkward) conversation with him for a bit to give them the time they need. Once she gets word that the hacking is complete, Ria stands up, ends the conversation immediately (while still trying to be polite), and leaves.
  • During the wedding escape, Alba takes and wears Lena's veil, and she, Clara, and Kovacs use this to get the rest of the posse to chase after them instead, leaving only Raheela and Salim left for the Khan sisters to face.
• Wire Fu: Implemented in the fight scenes and the scenes of Ria's martial arts — very conspicuously so.

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