The quietness with which Hum Sub made it to cinemas misleads one to think that the film would be just as voiceless. One couldn’t have been more mistaken.

The film, written by Zeeshan Junaid and Tehseen Khan and directed by Aayan Hussain, has a voice — hoarse, rumbustious, tone-deaf and anti-sectarian, but a voice nonetheless.

Hum Sub screams with the conviction of a madman who has surrendered himself to a delusion. The narrative it weaves is a spurious fallacy that cross-breeds life’s very real issues with the suspension of disbelief. The result is a blundered chimera that asks you to empathise with the absurd, amateur way the story depicts real-world problems and the way the makers — but not the people at large — see them in Pakistan.

To say that the film and its storytelling approach is stupid, would be an insult to stupidity — and those who make stupid, bad films. And Hum Sub is bad on so many levels: cinematography, sound, the abrupt starts and fades of music, the plot, the characters.

Hum Sub is an experience. An experience of the harrowing kind

Two youngsters (Fazal Hussain, Zuhab Khan) are denied entrance into a posh restaurant. This sparks an angry confrontation that somehow provokes them to impulsively carjack an expensive automobile that just parked in front of them.

Coming out of the car is an up-and-coming politician and his demanding, racist, snobby wife (Saud and Javeria Saud). Distraught out of her wits, she reports the car stolen to the police, and he, somehow embarrassed with the idea that a minister’s car could be stolen at gunpoint, sets an assassin (Assad Mumtaz) on the boys’ tail.

Meanwhile, a Hindu family (Sajid Hassan, playing the patriarch) is tyrannised and provoked by their neighbour (Adnan Shah Tipu), who wants to bully them into migrating to India. Also meanwhile, a husband and wife (Junaid Niazi, Azekiah Daniel) are stopped on a highway by a bad cop (Ali Josh), who sexually harasses the woman because she married out of her ethnic group (she is Punjabi, her husband is Pakhtun) — and no, the cop did not know her from before.

In another vaguely connected end, a high-ranking police investigator (the always enigmatic Alyy Khan, perhaps the best actor here), tries to make sense of the non-existent connection between the politician, the stolen car and — bafflingly — the fate of Pakistan’s youth at large, to the chagrin of his baffled superior (Javed Sheikh).

The two youngsters, meanwhile, hit a man riding a bike — who screams that they did so because he was a Hindu — decide to take him to the hospital, put a gun on him since he was wailing their ears off, and then literally kick him out of the car on to a sidewalk. They then try to sell the stolen car to black marketeers and then take on an assignment to traffic young women.

Traffic — the Oscar-winning Steven Soderbergh film about unconnected stories — this ain’t by a longshot. Like Traffic, the stories culminate in a single day but, given the pitiful decisions the screenplay takes, one undergoes a lifetime’s worth of torment in Hum Sub’s two-hour running time.

While one can overlook, and perhaps even shake their head at the ludicrousness of the enterprise, one cannot, in any way, look past the insensitive, bigoted, belittling point of view of the narrative.

One understands that the filmmakers wanted to make a sweeping statement about the fallibility of man and society by holding a mirror in front of our faces in a bid to stir our souls from oblivion. In the hands of masters, this storytelling approach could, perhaps, have been an experience. In the hands of amateurs, it is an experience of the harrowing kind.g

Executive Produced by Azhar Qasmi, Produced by Mehmood Qasmi and Released by Hum Films, Hum Sub is rated A – that’s “A” for Adult themes, not “A” as a grade of excellence

Published in Dawn, ICON, August 24th, 2025