TORONTO \u2014 There\u2019s a scene in \u201cShook\u201d in which the drama\u2019s lead tells a Toronto hipster that he lives in Scarborough. Her response \u2014 \u201cOooh, Scarborough\u201d \u2014 comes off as if he just name-dropped a war zone.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat literally happened to me,\u201d says director and co-writer Amar Wala, who grew up in the multicultural east-Toronto suburb.<\/p>\n
\u201cI didn\u2019t know that Scarborough had this dangerous reputation growing up. To me, it was just Scarborough. It was fine.\u201d<\/p>\n
The moment stuck with him.<\/p>\n
\u201cI told myself, \u2018I\u2019m going to put this in a movie one day.\u2019 It took a while, but here it is.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cShook\u201d stars Saamer Usmani as Ash, a South Asian twentysomething trying to make it as a novelist while navigating his family\u2019s unravelling, a romantic entanglement and the quiet class divisions of the Greater Toronto Area. <\/p>\n
The film, out Friday, draws from a turbulent stretch in Wala\u2019s mid-20s, when he was chasing his filmmaking dreams amid his parents\u2019 divorce and his father\u2019s subsequent Parkinson\u2019s diagnosis.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a lot of things all hitting at once, when you\u2019re supposed to figure out what it means to be an adult,\u201d Wala says in a virtual call from Toronto. <\/p>\n
\u201cAt the time, I was doing what I think a lot of us do when we\u2019re writers: travel downtown, sit in coffee shops, write \u2014 or pretend to write most of the time \u2014 and figure out what it actually means to be a working artist.\u201d <\/p>\n
Despite his proximity to the city\u2019s cultural core, Wala says breaking into the arts community felt like trying to push through an invisible wall.<\/p>\n
Wala says he wanted to make a Toronto film that captured the subtle, everyday obstacles that come with being \u201ca brown kid from the suburbs.\u201d<\/p>\n
One recurring gag sees South Asian characters give baristas a \u201cfake white name\u201d that\u2019s easy to write on coffee cups.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s stuff I felt was relatable to a lot of people who live just on the outside of major cities, where you might as well be from another state,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat distance may be short in terms of kilometres \u2014 you can see the skyline \u2014 but you\u2019re not that connected to the arts community or to the power structures or the money of the city, and so that distance feels gigantic.\u201d<\/p>\n
When Wala started out more than a decade ago, he had no industry connections and no clear path in. While he aspired to make narrative features, documentaries offered a more accessible entry point. <\/p>\n
His debut doc, 2014\u2019s \u201cThe Secret Trial 5,\u201d examines Canada\u2019s post-9\/11 use of security certificates to imprison Muslim men without charge. <\/p>\n
\u201cShook,\u201d Wala\u2019s debut scripted feature, co-written with Adnan Khan, isn\u2019t overtly political. Instead, it centres on Ash\u2019s personal coming-of-age as he explores a budding romance with barista Claire, played by Amy Forsyth, while trying to deal with the emotional debris left by his parents, played by Bernard White and Pamela Mala Sinha.<\/p>\n
Still, the film captures the invisible systems that shape who gets to feel at home in a city like Toronto.<\/p>\n
When Ash and his friends miss the last subway train home, they must weather the chaos of the night bus \u2014 known colloquially as \u201cthe vomit comet.\u201d <\/p>\n
\u201cIt just seems silly that last call is at 2 a.m. but the subway shuts down at 1:30. That tells you who they\u2019re actually thinking about when they build these systems,\u201d Wala says.<\/p>\n
\u201cShook\u201d joins a growing wave of Canadian films set in Scarborough \u2014 including 2021\u2019s \u201cScarborough,\u201d 2022\u2019s \u201cBrother\u201d and this year\u2019s \u201cMorningside\u201d \u2014 and does so with a self-aware nod to its cinematic company.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe ends are hot right now,\u201d a publisher tells Ash as he pitches a novel set in the east-end suburb.<\/p>\n
Wala suspects Scarborough artists are feeling more pride after years of being \u201con the outside looking in.\u201d But he\u2019s wary of how quickly the industry can turn authenticity into formula. <\/p>\n
\u201cAs soon as they realize, \u2018Oh, there\u2019s an audience for this stuff,\u2019 they only want to give you the same version of that thing over and over again,\u201d he says. <\/p>\n
\u201cThey don\u2019t understand it\u2019s a diversity of perspectives from these places that the audience is craving.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wala hopes \u201cShook\u201d challenges the narrow, often dreary portrayals of the area by presenting Scarborough as he remembers it: vibrant, lived-in, lush. <\/p>\n
\u201cPeople say to me, like, \u2018Scarborough looks so good in the movie. You shot it so beautifully.\u2019 And I\u2019m like, I didn\u2019t do anything to it,\u201d he says. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe just used some nice lenses and colour corrected it. It looks gorgeous because that\u2019s what it looks like. A lot of those bleak depictions of it \u2014 you have to go out of your way to make it look like that.\u201d<\/p>\n
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 7, 2025.<\/p>\n
Alex Nino Gheciu, The Canadian Press<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"TORONTO \u2014 There\u2019s a scene in \u201cShook\u201d in which the drama\u2019s lead tells a Toronto hipster that he…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":51965,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[76,49,48,75,1554,337],"class_list":["post-51964","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-arts","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-film","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51964","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51964"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51964\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/51965"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51964"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51964"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51964"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}