Naz & Maalik is about two gay Muslim teens living in Brooklyn struggling with the intersection of their relationship and their faith. It’s an intriguing premise that the film doesn’t fully realize.
Naz & Maalik excels at portraying the relationship between the titular characters. The actors (Kerwin Johnson Jr. and Curtiss Cook Jr.) have an easy chemistry and it’s incredibly refreshing to see a gay romance between people of color given such complexity. Naz and Malik’s interactions run the gamut from playful to awkward to sexual to aggressive, and it’s fascinating to watch.
The film’s shortcomings result from its tremendous lack of depth. It feels like a short film’s worth of material stretched to 80 minutes. The main relationship is engaging, but that is mostly due to the strengths of the lead actors. Their characters are underwritten and the conflicts surrounding them are absurdly one-dimensional. A clunky subplot with an FBI agent (Annie Grier) surveying Naz and Maalik felt particularly as though it was created solely to pad out the running time.
It’s disappointing, because Naz & Malik addresses so many topics ignored by most mainstream Hollywood films but does justice to hardly any of them. It makes the film’s failures sting that much more, because who knows when another film will surface that broaches these topics.
