[Sundance 2023 Review] 'Polite Society' is Effortlessly Charming Thanks to Priya Kansara

When a movie has as much energy, charm and profound enthusiasm as writer/director Nida Manzoor’s Polite Society, you’re willing to overlook some of the more underdeveloped elements of the story. This is doubly true when you have a star-in-the-making performance by Priya Kansara as the main character Ria, a British-Pakistani high schooler who dreams of one day becoming as famous a stuntwoman as Eunice Huthart. Like Ria, Polite Society swings for the fences, throwing in audacious plot developments along with homages to bigger films and a central conceit that takes the silliness through multiple quick stops in various genres. It doesn’t always work, but with as much passionate eagerness on display, it’s still an easy recommendation. 

Told through various chapter inserts (The first being “A Tale of Two Sisters”), Polite Society opens with Ria practicing her martial arts and sword skills, swinging her weapon and yelling, “I am the Fury!” into a camera. She has a YouTube channel chronicling her rise as an amateur stuntwoman and with the reappearance of her sister Lena (Ritu Arya), who dropped out of art school to come home, she’s living life. Lena is hilariously introduced emerging from a restaurant eating a whole chicken while dodging some nosy aunties on the street.

While her life is in limbo, she helps Ria by filming her YouTube stuntwoman pursuits and reconnecting with her sister. Their relationship forms the strongest bond in Polite Society and have the kind of sisterly relationship we rarely see in cinema. They obviously care about each other very much and want each other to succeed in their artistic careers. 

But the parents (played by Jeff Mirza and Shobu Kappor) want Lena to embrace adulthood and get married. So they manage to get an invite to a lavish Eid Soiree where Lena catches the eye of the impossibly good-looking, rich and smart Salim (Akshay Khanna) and his devious mother Raheela (Ms. Marvel’s Nimra Bucha). Ria is immediately put off by the whole situation, realizing that Salim has a huge “wedding boner” and he’s actively searching for a wife. Lena, meanwhile, shrugs it off because she doesn’t see her college dropout self as much of a catch. But the courtship starts immediately, which pisses off Ria, who complains to her friends, “she’s seeing him every other day, she’s not working on her art…she’s wearing a cardigan!” 

So she enlists the help of her friends Clara (Seraphina Beh) and Alba (Ella Bruccoleri) to find out how to take Salim down. What follows is a narrative that playfully moves through various genres and subgenres as Ria plans and executes various heists to try to find or create dirt on Salim and, eventually, save her sister from the clutches of polite society. It hits a lot of the beats you’d expect in a movie in which a woman infiltrates a men’s locker room with a mustache that would make Tom Selleck jealous. But it’s all done in a delightfully over-the-top manner, such as when Raheela captures and tortures Ria…by giving her a spa day that culminates in painful leg waxing. 

Polite Society succeeds because of the high energy go-for-broke propulsion of the narrative and its starry-eyed lead actor. It has charm to spare in its presentation, taking a page from Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, by presenting fights between Ria and her various foes as fighting game matches. Ria vs. X shows up on the screen and the audio cues are filled with screeching eagles and booming special effects add to the hilarity. The editing, meanwhile, by Robbie Morrison, accentuates the humor with a feeling of cheeky playfulness. The star, though, is Priya Kansara whose boundless energy carries most of the film, even when the narrative starts to sputter as it moves through the second and third acts. Polite Society diverges into sci-fi and horror (with tinges of Society…though don’t expect any gross shuntings) as well as heist films and so much more that it can start to lose its energy over the runtime. But Priya’s own enthusiasm carries the film and it’s never not charming to watch.