Standing on snowy terrains beside the icy rivers of Swat, two young runaways — Bisma and Yousuf (Zara Hayat, Aadi Khan) — come to a bitter realisation: they shouldn’t have left home. The big, bad world, it turns out, is no place for young lovers, especially when it keeps asking simple questions like: why aren’t you married yet?

At this juncture, the audience is asking the same thing.

Bisma, fleeing a forced marriage to her gay cousin from the US, confesses to Yousuf that her impulsive streak makes her act first, think later. In hindsight, Bisma shares this affliction with Shahzad Rafique, the writer and director of Welcome to Punjab.

Rafique’s film — at times the word “film” feels justified — has a sweet, if misplaced, soul. It should have been a tale about young love and family values, and only passingly touched upon serious themes such as migration, discrimination, generational rigidity and tourism.

Shahzad Rafique’s Welcome to Punjab is dated in look and music and has minimal storytelling

Instead, the screenplay (with consultations from Nasir Adeeb and Khalil-ur-Rehman Qamar) flips the order. Romance is flung out the window, family drama is needlessly amplified — though most crises deflate after basic, superficial conversations — and, oddly enough, a Karachi-vs-Punjab debate takes centre stage.

Yes, it is Karachi against an entire province — a city of unrest and crime, depicted in an image that Punjab, allegedly, buys wholesale.

To soften the blow, a character concedes that Karachi boasts the country’s highest GDP. Rafique even draws a metaphor through a dialogue, making Karachi the father (perhaps symbolically represented by the film’s unheeding elders), and Lahore the nurturing mother. The rest of Sindh, such as Sukkur (which makes a grand, late entrance), remains beautiful and unblemished.

Opening with a flashback inside a flashback inside yet another flashback (take that Christopher Nolan and Inception), Punjab literally embraces the Zakaria family (led by Sajid Hasan) after their perpetually fuming son (Ansar Khan) is nabbed by the police because he hangs out with delinquents… and perhaps also because he is spectacularly bad in the acting department. Yasir Nawaz, slipping easily into the role, cameos as a stern but sympathetic police head whose shadow-engulfed office begs the question: does the police not have money to pay their electricity bill?

Instead of getting his house in order, Zakaria migrates to Lahore — a city his wife, Shahenshahi Begum (Bushra Ansari), doesn’t understand. Loud, unheeding and bickering, Ansari plays up the role with the gusto of those elderly, hard-to-please, lower-middle-class women we used to see on PTV (and in our families) decades ago.

Shahenshahi Begum’s dream for her daughter is a US passport. The daughter’s dream, or who she is as a character, we never find out. Yousuf, her love interest, at least, loves playing his guitar. The two are simple with a capital ‘S’, and the screenplay never forces them to mature or grow personalities, because the task of growing up is relegated to the elders.

That, one suspects, is the film’s actual gist — and it might have worked, if the writing went beyond the basics and the mundane.

The adults nitpick and squabble over little, easily solvable things. Javed Sheikh, as Sheikh sahib, Yousuf’s father, plays the inflexible patriarch whose stern authority keeps his clan — a brother (Iftekhar Thakur) and a son (Qaisar Pia) — in line. His wife, played by silver-screen veteran Mumtaz Begum, is underwritten, like everyone else.

Late in the film, Sheikh Sahib and Zakaria get a wake-up call from Adnan Siddiqui and his wife, Arjumand Raheem. She is Sheikh’s disowned sister, who lives in Sukkur, and takes the family in when they temporarily escape society’s prosecuting gaze after the story takes a semi-violent turn.

This movie didn’t need a fight choreographer, and yet, given its single, pitiful alleyway brawl, maybe it did. Most confrontations, though, arrive via ponderous, repetitive dialogue. Some come courtesy of Firdaus Jamal’s Hakeem sahib, who dispenses eternal wisdom by suggesting letting things simmer down.

At least the frames look lovely… when Welcome to Punjab goes outside. Sometimes.

More often than not, Adil Askari’s cinematography prefers harsh lighting that bathes actors in clashing warm and cold tones to add dimension. This is the old Lollywood way of lighting, which aligns with another dated aspect of the film: its music.

‘Kholi Dil Di Kitab’, the final composition by the late Zulfiqar Ali, recalls Lollywood of the late ’90s, early 2000s. ‘Iss Jahan Mein Pehlay Din Se’ (by M. Arshad) could have wandered in from an early-2000s’ Vikram Bhatt film. ‘Mehki Hui Raat’ (also by Arshad) emits serious semi-classical South Indian vibes — again, circa 2000.

And that’s the best way to describe Rafique’s film: dated in look and music, and with minimal storytelling. It drags badly, especially after intermission, but it is better than the bulk of unwatchable disasters — from Karachi and Punjab — that land in theatres to sully Pakistani cinema’s name.

Released by Mandviwalla Entertainment, Welcome to Punjab is rated U (Universal), and features meek emotional conflict between staunch old people who don’t want to change, and youngsters who don’t know what they want

Published in Dawn, ICON, August 24th, 2025