Filmmakers have two misplaced beliefs about Eid releases.
First, everyone thinks their movie will make box-office history — especially when they lock an Eidul Azha date. Second, they (and for a time, I, too) believed that the only genre that really worked at Eid was family movies — quite literally, because families were out and about.
On the surface, the beliefs seem sound. However, despite the excess of showtimes from pre-noon to past-dawn, Eid is just another day at the movies.
Films bomb when people have no interest, irrespective of whether they have a big TV media partner behind them or not. Also, the lack of variety in genres — especially in Pakistani movies — limits the audience to families, most of whom have to be forcefully coerced from their homes, rather than the regular Joes who frequent cinemas for international movies.
The regular Joes (and by proxy, families, since it’s Eid) is the audience Zombeid was made for — Nabeel Qureshi and Fizza Ali Meerza’s self-distributed, international-quality zombie actioner that carried a smart twist in its title.
From Pakistan, this Eidul Azha brought audiences a zombie thriller set in a gym, an adult romance melodrama dressed up as a family entertainer and a sprawling psychological thriller that required even more suspension of disbelief. Icon concludes that, between Zombeid, Luv Di Saun and Psycho, there was only one clear winner
The other different choice one was looking out for was Psycho — Shaan Shahid’s purportedly big, expectedly all-over-the-place psychological thriller and legal drama, released by Eveready Pictures.
The third film was the safest bet: Luv Di Saun, a Farhan Saeed family drama backed by the go-to juggernaut distributor of family dramas that nearly always wins big — ARY Films.
If Karachi’s Nueplex Askari (where I saw the films on the first day of Eid) were an outdoor cinema, one would have heard crickets in the aisles. Psycho had, maybe, fewer than 15 people (I didn’t count). Luv Di Saun had 17 (I counted twice).
At the end of the latter’s show, two aunties — one middle-aged, one a little elderly — walked over to the exit, summing up their experience after the climactic debacle: “Now I understand why the hall is empty,” one of them uttered.
Thankfully, the next show — Zombeid — was filled to the brim. And the crowd cheered.
DIE HARD, YOU ZOMBIES!
I’ve often wondered why our filmmakers don’t use pull-quotes from reviews to hype their films, especially when the reviews are good. Is it because reviews arrive late, or because critics don’t give them quotable lines? Let’s rectify that right now.
In Zombeid, the undead have rarely felt this alive! Too corny?
Equal parts chaos, charm, and carnage. A tentpole of the highest order. Too clichéd?
Proof that the zombie apocalypse still has surprises left. A tad much? I agree.
How about: A genre defibrillator! Zombeid shocks the undead narrative back to life. Or: Delightfully vicious — a story of the rotting dead with a racing pulse.
In case you’re wondering, this reviewer means every word.
Filmmaking duo Nabeel Qureshi and Fizza Ali Meerza have been on a solid run lately. Both Na Baligh Afraad and their segment Jinn Mahal in Teri Meri Kahaniyaan showcased growing maturity. With Zombeid, they’ve largely overcome their old fallibilities.
The film is a solid entertainer — a horror-less action-fest (think Die Hard in a zombie-infested gym) — built on a simple plot, brisk pacing, familiar tropes and adequate character depth.
Fahad Mustafa — riding high after Aag Lagay Basti Mein — plays Wali, a former bodybuilder who won Mr Pakistan, only to lose everything hours later when a car accident critically injured his spine and claimed the life of his mentor and father figure (Javed Sheikh, in a small role).
Two years later, Wali, fully recovered, interviews at a posh multi-storey gym. Cocky, yet sincere, he quickly woos Zara, the Zumba instructor (Mehwish Hayat, as perfect an actress as any). However, his determination doesn’t sit well with the gym’s owner (Wajahat Rauf) or head trainer Marwan (Dodi Khan), an excessively beefed-up villain peddling contraband muscle-growth injections.
Marwan’s clients include Mohsin Abbas Haider (playing himself) and a scrawny young man desperate for a muscle spurt. He also carries a grudge against Wali. The two once trained together for Mr Pakistan, but Marwan was disqualified for doping. Their eventual clash feels inevitable.
Before the night is out, one of Marwan’s injections — purportedly smuggled from India — begins mutating people into flesh-eating zombies. Unlike most zombie films, people here know exactly what the undead are, thanks to movies and video games (Train to Busan even gets an early nod). The knowledge doesn’t help much.
The rest is predictable territory, given the genre. A handful of trapped characters — a diabetic elderly woman, a snivelling coward (Mani), a mother and son, among others — try to survive the night, one casualty at a time. The authorities, surprisingly, respond quickly. Police, led by Babar Ali, cordon off the building while news media circle outside, confused but hungry for an exclusive.
Nabeel and Fizza have deliberately designed a very modern film that embraces classic tropes and local humour without bias.
There are minor slip-ups, of course. For instance, the origin of the zombie-making vials is never explained, and the zombies themselves are designed to be fairly dim; they swarm around anything that grabs their attention — phone or speaker — without destroying it. The group’s escape-and-regroup cycle also grows repetitive, and a side mission to find food for the diabetic aunty briefly slows the pace.
Then again, I’ve seen far dumber, cheaper-looking zombie films from Hollywood and East Asia. In comparison, Zombeid, despite being confined largely to gym sets, looks like a million bucks.
The credit for the visual design goes to Filmwala’s production design team and Rana Kamran’s sleek cinematography. The film’s neon-pastel lighting often resembles a South Korean music video, while the colour grading wisely avoids the teal-orange sameness that plagues most contemporary films.
Production design, make-up, and visual effects are top-notch, save for one glaring exception: the unconvincing head-pasting job on Fahad Mustafa’s younger, beefed-up self.
Films bomb when people have no interest, irrespective of whether they have a big TV media partner behind them or not. Also, the lack of variety in genres — especially in Pakistani movies — limits the audience to families, most of whom have to be forcefully coerced from their homes, rather than the regular Joes who frequent cinemas for international movies.
Speaking of the actor, he is clearly ensuring his recent roles don’t overlap. Wali speaks with a slight gravelly texture, is easily irritated and moves like a man desperate to reclaim his worth. By the end of the night, he does.
By the end of the film, so do Nabeel and Fizza, by delivering a film that really matters to the audience. Perhaps one can say: Filmwala Pictures raises the dead. And the bar. Now that’s a printable pull quote if there ever were one!
FOR THE ‘LUV’ OF…
Cinephiles may never forgive me for drawing this parallel, but humour me for a second.
In 1966, Raj Kapoor starred in a gem called Teesri Kasam, playing a simple, innocent man whose bullock cart carries a nautanki [stage]dancer (Waheeda Rehman) to a village fair. Growing close to her and realising she is perceived as a prostitute, he insists she quit. When she doesn’t, he takes a vow — ie the film’s title — to never carry a nautanki dancer again.
Film critics cannot take such a vow, even if films such as Luv Di Saun (LDS) make you wish you could. Breaking ARY Films’ hit streak, LDS shares a parallel with Teesri Kasam — if, that is, you squint and tilt your head to an impossible angle.
Zarshaan (Farhan Saeed) is an educated young man whose worldly experience stands in stark contrast to his naivety. After losing his parents (Usman Peerzada and Saba Hameed) in a badly AI-generated highway accident, he moves from Thailand to his ancestral home in old Lahore, where he chooses to wallow in melancholy and idleness.
Despite his aspirational outlook, film-hero looks and a Harley-like bike, one quickly realises the man is not wired for either grunt or office work. Rather than hunt for a job, he chooses to rent out a room in his dusty apartment. One would think a place infested with white mice and littered with broken pianos, typewriters and chairs would be a hard sell.
Well, think again. The room is quickly taken by Billo (Mamya Shajaffar), a chirpy, unblinking young woman and her Hindu friend Sureet (Mehrunnisa Iqbal). Zarshaan has no qualms about renting to two beautiful young women without an elder — damn the neighbourhood! Not that the neighbourhood seems to care, though they should.
One look at them and you know these girls are trouble. They strut home late at night in glitzy outfits that don’t gel with old Lahore’s conservative cultural outlook, and almost scamper under the bed when police sirens blare.
Zarshaan remains oblivious until people inform him that Billo is one of Lahore’s most sought-after tawaaifs (the correct word here is prostitute, given the inference from the dialogues).
Billo, Sureet and others in her line of work are the property of an unhinged gangster-pimp (Tabrez Khan, exceedingly over the top) — a barely written villain brute-forced into the story. By the same logic, we get Happy Singh (Rana Ejaz), a comedic sidekick with no humour and abundant lechery, who cheats on his wife. She, by the way, happily reciprocates by having an affair of her own. What a film!
Prostitutes, lecherous two-timers, underwritten characters who either mope or don’t know what they want — LDS is a bizarre family romance drama. Then again, I’d strike all three words.
While one waits for anything to click, writer Wajid Zuberi and director Imran Malik (who also takes producer and story credits) throw a spanner into their own works.
Enter Babar Ali, bodyguard to a billionaire (Rashid Khwaja), searching for his employer’s long-lost heir. That heir is — you guessed it — Billo. But don’t slap your forehead just yet.
As if one spanner weren’t enough, the final 10 minutes throw another. Humayun Saeed, a supercop with killer fists and a tasbeeh (prayer beads), smashes his way into the movie, liberating women from sex-trafficking rings and then stealing the entire film from Farhan Saeed.
If you ask me, that’s sheer injustice to a leading man who carries the bulk of this half-thought-out movie.
Since throwing a spanner into the narrative weren’t enough, Malik throws one at the audience as well with a “To be continued” card, effectively threatening people with a Part 2. You may now slap your head.
Despite its two-hour-22-minute runtime, LDS remains barely half a film. Will the next instalment deliver the missing one-and-a-half movie, the producers claim? Almost certainly not.
Malik repeats most of the problems from Azaadi, investing in everything but lucidity, logic, appealing characters and production design (much of the runtime unfolds inside Zarshaan’s two-room apartment). Unlike Azaadi, LDS has a better lead in Farhan Saeed, the film’s lone saving grace. The cinematography by Syed Faisal Bukhari is also serviceable, as are the two half-decent songs. That’s not enough on a good day… and the day you watch LDS would definitely not be counted as ‘good’.
LDS could have been a vow to champion Pakistani cinema (Saun being Punjabi for ‘oath’). Instead, it drives the viewer to take a vow against the medium altogether. The film could’ve been my ‘teesri kasam’ (a vow to forsake films)… if it weren’t for Psycho.
IN THE MIND OF MADNESS
Amid flickering red lights and close-ups of Meera’s face, Psycho’s teaser promised a disturbing tale of a shattered mind, driven to villainous extremes.
“The real enemy lives in the mind,” the words on-screen testified. But what if the enemy is the mind? Or what if what lives in the mind never makes it to the screen?
The latter is precisely what happens in Shaan Shahid’s new written-and-directed venture. The mind (pardon the frequent use), along with logic, spatial continuity and coherence between what you hear and what you see, is exactly what you forfeit while watching this nearly two-and-a-half-hour film. A film that has little to do with psychology, mental illness, suspense or lucidity.
But if anything, Shaan has a penchant for giving you more than one film for the price of a ticket. We get roughly three good ones trapped inside Psycho.
The first is a romance-drama about rival legal eagles. Representing justice is Sarah (Sonya Hussyn, quite good), who claims she wanted to bring down corrupt people “ever since [she] wanted to grow up.”
The line feels off because it targets Salman Raza (Shaan) — the sharpest, most successful, corrupt lawyer in Pakistan. A man who deploys every unethical tactic in the book, while flashing the smirk of a bona fide douche. Sarah’s lifelong determination to bring him down raises questions about Salman’s age, especially given their romantic involvement.
Despite their love, she refuses to wear his ring until he abandons his bad ways. However, irrespective of the bonds of holy matrimony, the two are modern enough to have a live-in relationship in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan (gasp!).
Unsurprisingly, both are protégés of the now-retired Raza Ahsan (Javed Sheikh), who claims to have left his practice to them. That dialogue immediately lands the film in a legal predicament called ‘imputed disqualification’. Lawyers from the same firm cannot represent opposing sides, which they do in the film’s first case. Even if they weren’t from the same firm — which the film neither accepts nor denies — there remains the problem of conflict of interest.
A later case puts Salman into compromised advocacy when he suddenly sprouts a conscience, prosecutes his former clients and then kills them with a katana (Shabbir Jan plays an underworld don in a badly written subplot).
Don’t scoff. This is Shaan. Of course he plays a lawyer who kills like a ninja assassin. Chalk it up to suspension of disbelief. And yes, that’s a whole lotta suspension.
The second film hidden inside Psycho is a sordid murder mystery, featuring Ahsan and his wife, Zara (Meera). She runs an NGO and is secretly sleeping with a married man (Adnan Butt). Ahsan discovers the affair through an accidental video call that somehow captures the encounter from six different camera angles!
Impregnated by her lover, Zara snaps into full “psycho” mode without build-up, repeatedly declaring, “I am so happy!” — her defining phrase.
Ahsan, of course, doesn’t survive her unhinged wrath. Zara lands on death row, only to be saved by a last-minute pregnancy discovery via stethoscope at the gallows.
Suspension of disbelief still there? Good, because you’ll need it now as we segue into the third film: the story of bumbling, lascivious inspector Jamshed (Nayyer Ejaz) — a genius detective whose own wife is having an affair. (First LDS, now Psycho — is infidelity the new in-thing for filmmakers?)
Sarah (the anti-corruption lawyer) hires Inspector Jamshed to find Salman (the corrupt lawyer), who has vanished into the northern areas after taking on a transvestite’s case. Roughly six days later, Jamshed identifies a cigarette butt our hero flicked into the street, and somehow tracks him down.
By now, the suspension of disbelief of even the most resolute of cinephiles may be dangling by a thread.
Psycho’s climax could pass as a standalone feature by itself. Then again, this is a recurring problem with Shaan’s recent films, be it Bullah (technically not directed by him), Zarrar or Arth — The Destination (’Fanaa’, a song from Arth, even makes an appearance here). Every individual section of his film overflows with excellent, if half-thought-out, ideas. Most work in isolation yet fail to connect to the bigger picture.
Like Arth and Bullah, the worst technical problems lie in the edit. Shot progressions, transitions, inserts, continuity — the entire film needs to return to the editing room for a complete overhaul. And don’t get me started on the music cues and comedic sound effects. My ears still hate me from the experience.
One cannot deny that Shaan’s ideas about story and character progression spring from strong narrative instincts that come naturally to a skilled filmmaker. Surprisingly, when filmed and edited, they come across as stubbornly superficial.
One also cannot deny that Shaan remains a formidable actor, with an eye for great framing (the cinematographer here is Saleem Daad), or that his cast — especially Meera, in her few good scenes, and Sonya Hussyn — do their characters justice whenever the film allows. Unfortunately, the film rarely does that.
And that’s Psycho’s exact shortcoming. It is a sprawling vision of a great, big movie that still resides in Shaan’s mind, imprisoned by the real enemy: too many half-thought-out decisions, a great many relying solely on the viewer’s willingness to suspend disbelief.
Ultimately, Psycho compels you to utterly suspend disbelief (and also close your eyes and ears when it comes to technical blunders) for the best experience, while Luv Di Saun makes you ask “why?” a thousand times out of boredom and almost give up on cinema.
But it is Zombeid that simply asks you to have a good time this Eidul Azha.
Zombeid and Luv Di Saun are rated U (suitable for all audiences).
Psycho is rated PG (Parental Guidance required)
The writer is Icon’s primary film reviewer
Published in Dawn, ICON, June 7th, 2026
