Cake review – Karachi sister act ditches melodrama for real

Asim Abbasi’s assured debut about a pair of siblings reunited around their father’s sickbed is richly realisedPakistani cinema has long struggled to match its Indian cousin’s commercial reach, but this impressive debut from Asim Abbasi feels like a sound bet, and even quietly revolutionary in places.Abbasi here revitalises a trope beloved of mawkish Bollywood melodrama – two thirtysomething sisters, reunited around an ailing father’s sickbed – by addressing the fallout with the deft, novelistic realism of a New Bollywood item such as Piku (2015).

Uncommonly alert to small, telling details, while more expansive in its attitudes, the result proves far richer and worldlier than anything previously observed coming down the Khyber Pass.

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