Shook

Struggling to sell his first novel and slightly adrift after his parents’ divorce, writer Ashish (Saamer Usmani) is thrown for several loops when he falls for barista Claire (Amy Forsyth) and learns his estranged father Vijay (Bernard White) has just been diagnosed with Parkinson’s.

Amar Wala’s first dramatic feature after a decade of documentaries (including The Secret Trial 5) and episodic production (Witness, Next Stop) is set in an instantly recognizable Scarborough, a place Ash is proud to call home even as he constantly flees into the city to write in coffee shops or go clubbing with his friends — until his father’s health crisis requires him to recalibrate both their lives.

Expanding on his 2018 short film of the same name, Wala sends us pinballing through the different spheres of Ash’s life, where he doesn’t exactly code-switch, but does give a white name when he orders an Americano, and finds publishers asking him to reshape his very personal work as coming from “outside Toronto” because readers are really into exoticism these days.

With charming, complicated characters and an unfailing attention to local detail — the beef patties at Warden station, the Hakka restaurant to which Ash keeps returning, the miseries of the night bus when you miss the last subway train — Shook is a love letter to Scarborough, sure, but also to the polyglot nature of the GTA and the way people come here to figure out who they are.

NORM WILNER

Content advisory: mature themes, sexually suggestive scenes, coarse language