Landing smack in the middle of Pride Month — and amidst the backdrop of troubling global headlines, including escalating tensions between Israel and Iran — The Queen of My Dreams arrives as a deeply personal yet tonally unpredictable exploration of queer identity, faith, and intergenerational trauma in a Pakistani Muslim family. While the film is heartfelt and visually lush at times, it occasionally struggles under the weight of its own ambition. Writer-director Fawzia Mirza clearly poured her soul into this project, but the final result, while noble in intent, ends up feeling like a patchwork of competing tones and storylines.
At its core, The Queen of My Dreams is about Azra, a young Pakistani Canadian woman trying to balance the expectations of her conservative Muslim upbringing with her own sexual identity and career ambitions. Played by the always-engaging Amrit Kaur (known to many as the wild child Bela from The Sex Lives of College Girls), Azra is a grad student and aspiring actress living in Toronto. Her world is jolted when her father unexpectedly passes away, prompting her return to Karachi to mourn — a place and a family dynamic she thought she had distanced herself from.
And here’s where things begin to sizzle.
Azra’s relationship with her mother Mariam (played with formidable intensity by Nimra Bucha) is, to put it mildly, complicated. Mariam is steeped in tradition, a woman who expects Azra to grieve in accordance with Islamic customs — wear the traditional garb, participate in women-only mourning rituals, and stay quiet while the men handle the important stuff. You know, the usual patriarchal family dynamics. Azra, being the bold, rebellious spirit that she is, refuses to play along quietly. What follows is a tense back-and-forth between mother and daughter, both of whom are mourning the same man but from vastly different emotional landscapes.
But Queen doesn’t just sit in this grief. In fact, it bounces around — literally — between decades and locations. Just as you’re settling into 1999 Karachi and all its cultural friction, the movie jumps to a Technicolor version of 1969, where we meet a much younger Mariam. Here, she’s portrayed by the same actress who plays Azra — Kaur in dual roles, which is both a clever casting decision and a narrative mirror showing how similar (yet misunderstood) these two women actually are. This version of Mariam is a vibrant, flirtatious dreamer, full of agency and charisma, embarking on a sweet romance with Azra’s future father. These sequences pop with vivid color and Bollywood flair, reminiscent of the Eastman Color-drenched films starring Sharmila Tagore — who also happens to be Azra’s cinematic idol.
In fact, cinema — particularly Bollywood — plays a big thematic role in Queen. Mirza’s original 2012 short film (a three-minute experimental piece) served as a foundational sketch for this feature-length debut. That short, playfully irreverent and proudly queer, saw Mirza imagining herself as a glamorous Bollywood heroine being wooed by a drag king. Now, in her feature debut, Mirza expands that vision into a layered tale that mixes homage, memory, and identity — pulling from her own experiences growing up queer and Muslim in Nova Scotia during the 1970s.
Yes, there’s another time jump.
Young Azra is played in these flashbacks by Ayana Manji, and this chapter of the film introduces us to yet another version of Mariam — this time as a mother juggling household duties and the growing realization that her daughter may not fit the mold she envisioned. It’s during these scenes that we see Mariam go through a radical shift of her own. After her husband’s heart attack, she doubles down on faith, becoming increasingly devout and promising God that she’ll follow traditional religious expectations if her husband survives. Spoiler: he does — but the cost of that survival is the erasure of her former, freer self.
It’s in these many layers — the 1999 grief-filled present, the 1969 pastel-hued love story, and the 1970s suburban adolescence — that Queen tries to weave together a narrative tapestry of identity, trauma, and longing. The challenge? The threads don’t always tie together smoothly. At times, the tonal whiplash is severe. One moment you’re swaying along with romantic music in a beautifully lit flashback. The next, you’re jolted into a dark, emotionally heavy confrontation in the present. The jumps between light-hearted musicality, dramatic family shouting matches, and subdued grief often feel too sudden, too disconnected.
To be fair, Bollywood cinema has always embraced tonal shifts — it’s part of the genre’s DNA to go from slapstick to melodrama to musical number within the same film. But here, the mix doesn’t always feel intentional. Instead, it comes across more like Mirza was worried this might be her only shot at telling her story — and wanted to cram in everything, everywhere, all at once (with none of the Daniels’ finesse). The result is a film that’s emotionally resonant in parts but ultimately scattered in delivery.
That said, the performances keep it grounded. Kaur pulls double duty with remarkable finesse. As the modern-day Azra, she exudes a mix of wounded pride and defensive sarcasm — someone who’s clearly been burned by her family’s expectations but still craves their love. As the younger Mariam, she lights up the screen with charm and hopefulness, offering a glimpse of who Mariam used to be before life, tradition, and heartbreak hardened her. It’s a clever piece of casting that subtly argues that mother and daughter aren’t as different as they think — they’re just products of very different times.
Then there’s Nimra Bucha, doing what she does best: portraying no-nonsense matriarchs with intense emotional depth. Fans of Ms. Marvel or Polite Society will instantly recognize her steely gaze and commanding presence. But here, she’s not a caricature. Her Mariam is someone who made sacrifices, who changed herself for the sake of family and faith, and who now struggles to connect with a daughter who feels alien to her. Bucha makes you feel every ounce of Mariam’s internal conflict — her stubbornness is really just pain in disguise.
Visually, the film also tries to match its era-hopping ambition. The 1969 scenes are dazzling — all soft filters, saturated colors, and dramatic framing. The 1970s segments go for a washed-out, grainy vibe that echoes the look of old family photo albums or retro educational films. And the present-day material is the most subdued, with its colder lighting and minimalistic approach reflecting the emotional chill between Azra and her mother. Mirza’s background in visual storytelling is evident — even if the story itself doesn’t always land.
One of the film’s more provocative thematic points is how it views the impact of religion — or rather, how religion, tradition, and patriarchal norms twist and reshape people’s lives. For Mariam, turning to Islam was a form of bargaining, of finding control in a chaotic world. But for Azra, that same tradition feels suffocating and alienating. The film doesn’t demonize Islam, but it does paint a fairly clear picture of how rigid cultural expectations can fracture families and silence individuality — especially when queerness enters the frame.
Mirza’s message seems to be this: things were freer, livelier, and more joyful before cultural conservatism took hold — especially post-Islamic Revolution. Through flashbacks and familial parallels, she’s telling us that reclaiming identity often means mourning what was lost, while still confronting the people and systems that made you feel invisible in the first place.
But here’s the rub: The Queen of My Dreams tries to be too many things. It wants to be a Bollywood romance, a coming-out story, a mother-daughter psychodrama, a historical exploration, and a personal memoir. Each element is compelling in isolation, but mashed together, they compete for attention instead of complementing each other. You get the sense that Mirza was holding nothing back — which is admirable, but also overwhelming.
Still, for all its unevenness, Queen is a bold, necessary film. It gives voice to a community rarely portrayed on screen: queer South Asian Muslims. And even when the storytelling falters, the representation alone is meaningful. For every moment that feels undercooked or rushed, there’s another that strikes a deeply personal, emotionally charged note.
You may not walk away feeling like it’s a perfect film, but you’ll definitely feel something — anger, sadness, nostalgia, hope. That’s more than a lot of movies can claim.
And maybe that’s the point.
Because going back home — whether physically or emotionally — is never a neat, tidy experience. It’s messy, it’s painful, it’s nostalgic. It makes you remember who you were and confront who you are. For queer folks navigating faith and family, that journey can be even more disorienting. The Queen of My Dreams doesn’t offer easy answers. But it dares to ask the hard questions. And that, in itself, is a victory.
