Sink: On the Battles No One Claps For

MAJOR SPOILERS ahead

What do you do?

That's the first question people ask every time they meet someone. At a dinner, a wedding, a queue. As if doing is the person. As if a job title says anything about a human worth meeting.

Around a year ago I posted on LinkedIn that I started working at a company. It got over a hundred likes. Two months ago, I posted that I started writing, thinking out loud, and got 14. Says a lot about the weight associated to what one "does" over who one is.

I'm not against job titles, I'm against the weight we assign to them, and how the complex aspects of a person get sidelined because of it. I'm against titles becoming more important than human essence, pushing us to compress ourselves into boxes that society recognizes and assigns status and merit to. We all do it, even if only subconsciously.

The people I find most interesting are the ones without a quick answer to the what-do-you-do question. The ones in the middle of changing, trying to feel a little more themselves. The ones who don't fit in the categories on offer. The ones doing work that no one calls work, that no one considers "success."

Which gets me thinking about the kinds of work that pass quietly, unnoticed and underappreciated. The work of caring. The work of managing. Treading water.

We usually don't ask about these at a dinner. There's no clear noun or category for them. So we ask the other question instead, the small one, and we never really meet anyone…

Watching Zain Duraie's Sink got me thinking more about this.

Sink is Duraie's first feature. A Jordanian film about a mother, Nadia, and her 17-year-old son, Basil, sliding into something they can't define.

The opening: a black screen and the sound of muffled water. We open on a closed frame centered on a swimming pool lane. The mother sits on the ledge, her back to us. She jumps in and swims off. Basil swims towards the viewers, then rests his arms on the ledge and looks around. Both of them in the same lane, in an empty pool.

Mother and son, sharing the same water, before any dialogue.

Water surrounds them from the start. I didn't notice it then. I felt it later.

From the opening, we're walled in. Tight frames. Cars. Rooms. Closed spaces. Trapped in this reality from the get-go.

Basil is full of life. He plays with his siblings. He's a lot. He's also a little off, judging by what society brands as normal. He gets expelled from school for hitting a teacher which means he will have to study on his own for his finals. When the family plans to travel to Aqaba for the other son's basketball competition, Basil insists on staying home so he can study. Nadia insists on staying with him to help.

The dialogue is a little mechanical at times. It sounds like people performing "normal." That rigidity works, transmitting the tense atmosphere of the house: something is off, something looming, something unspoken. A family sensing what they can't identify or admit yet.

The film never names what's happening to Basil. No diagnosis scene. No clinical declaration.

The power of Sink lies in its heavy visceral rhythm, built through a careful interplay of image, sound, and performance. Nothing is explained. Everything is felt. The deterioration of Basil's condition arrives the way it arrives in real life: gradually, incrementally, with the family half-inside it before they can understand what's happening.

In one scene, the mother wakes up on a bed in the corner of a room and, to her surprise, sees Basil with a horse head mask. He puts a rabbit head mask on her. Then he hops across the frame, full body in view. Left to right. A pause at the center, facing us. Out of frame, then back in from the other side. Five or six times. I counted because I really wanted it to end.

The cuts alternate between his hopping and her eyes peering from the rabbit head mask, baffled.

The scene transports a feeling language cannot: the disorientation of being close to someone whose mind is somewhere you cannot follow. Wanting to communicate and not knowing how. Both playing a game involuntarily. So much love between them, yet there is a massive gap neither can cross. In the same room, yet so far apart.

The scene isn't disturbing because of the head masks. It's disturbing because of what the whole experience of watching and hearing this scene transports to the audience: a genuine sensory discomfort you feel in your body. I wanted to look away. Not from fear, there's nothing scary on screen, but from that intense mix of discomfort, anxiety and sadness that I really wanted to end.

The director doesn't let it end, and that's the point. She won't let us out, just like the people living this can't get out either.

We can usually witness struggles like this from our comfort zones. Not here. That's why I admire Sink. The audience has no option but to truly FEEL it, not just empathize from a distance.

The use of form, incredible acting and minimal explicit explaining in this scene, and throughout the film, is what makes Sink an immersive and sensory experience, mentally and emotionally exhausting. It's a powerful way to convey such complex realities.

In another scene, we see the corner of Basil's room in a closed frame. In the corner, a closet. On the right door of the closet, a vertical rectangular mirror. By the time our eyes reach the mirror and see the details, we're already short of breath and claustrophobic. We see the mom and dad hugging Basil while he sobs. We don't see them; we see their reflection in the mirror.

In a pivotal scene, Nadia finds Basil in a chicken shed in a park. He's there and not there. She tries to bring him back through conversation, the way we usually try, calling him toward our reality. It doesn't work.

Then she makes a chicken sound.

And the frame opens up. The ratio changes. From boxed aspect to full screen. Close-up on her face. Cut to his, as he makes the sound back.

That's the moment the film stops asking him to come to us, to our "normal".

The mother goes to him.

The world expands around them only when she stops insisting on her version of reality. Even if briefly.

I keep thinking about how rare that is. How much of our care and "kindness" is actually a demand: come back, be how you were, behave the way we can understand you. True understanding or knowing others happens only when someone is willing to step into the other person's reality however strange and difficult it looks.

Basil's father fails at this. At some point he says something along the lines of: I wish he was just normal. Wanting him to be "normal" isn't loving him. It's loving the version of Basil that would be easier to live with, and will make him look good in society.

Some films build emotion slowly, layering it scene by scene, until one unexpected moment detonates all of it. Sentimental Value, a film about something else entirely, does exactly this. Two sisters, both marked by a rough childhood. The older carries the damage openly. Near the end, the younger sister tells her: we didn't have the same childhood. "I had you". This reframes everything, for us and for the older sister herself. In one line, she's given something she never knew she needed: proof that her presence mattered. I couldn't stop the tears.

Sink does something similar. Everything accumulates, and then the last scene hits hard.

Basil calls the police.

Not on someone.

On himself.

To protect his mother.

From himself.

That's the dagger. In that one final moment everything reframes.

He knows. He's known the whole time.

He's been trying. Fighting something within him and outside of him simultaneously. He's been protecting the people he loves from something he can't fully grasp, and he knew it well enough to make a phone call.

Basil is in there after all. Trying so hard to figure out what is happening to him.

The police knock. Nadia opens the door in a turtleneck, hiding the marks on her neck.

They tell her Basil called.

She stops hearing everything else. Rushes to the ambulance to Basil.

She never told anyone what had happened. Not even her husband. She just kept trying to figure out how to get Basil to a doctor.

The film ends on that ambulance in a street at night. The back door open. Inside the enclosed space, Basil sitting on one side, Nadia on the other, holding his hand.

Just like the pool in the opening, both in one lane. But this time they're facing each other. They are there for each other, no matter what this is or where it's going.

It's impossible to understand what people diagnosed with mental illness experience.

It gets me thinking about how many people I've sat across at dinners and at work, who were not seen. Performing fine on the outside, burying the confusion and the heaviness deep enough to pass as normal, to belong. People I found out later had been carrying a weight I had no idea about. I hope I was kind.

How many stories walk into a room with us that we'll never know.

One film can't do everything.

We watch most of Sink from the mother's point of view. She's the one closest to our reality, the most understandable character, so she's the one we follow. The film leans on her exhaustion, her confusion, her love. And that's fair.

Basil is on screen constantly. Close-ups on him, his gaze, his intense features. We see him staring at himself in the mirror, sitting by the trembling washing machine, hiding in a corner. The film keeps showing him to us. But we never reach what's inside him. He's somewhere else, losing touch with our reality, existing in his own.

At first, I thought this distance between us and Basil could be a limitation of the film. I now think it's the honesty of it. No one outside that mind can enter it. Not the family. Not the audience. Not the filmmakers. What the film shows us is this gap: what it looks like from just outside. And that gap, between him and everyone trying to reach him, is the same gap the rest of the world lives in when it looks at people placed in the same box as Basil.

I want to know what he was seeing. What he was hearing. How the room looked from inside his head when his mother was speaking to him and he couldn't reach her. How alienating. How exhausting!

There is only one analogy to Basil's state that I can think of.

I imagine going through a bad trip. The kind from recreational drugs you try and regret. Reality warps. Faces shift. The walls do strange things. Your pets talk to you. Paranoia kicks in. You're suspicious of everything and everyone, of your own thoughts.

And then, I imagine, not snapping out of it. Ever.

And on top of all that, having to function in a "normal" society with all that happening. Interact with "normal" people. Show up. Smile. Perform "normal".

I think that is the mother of all human struggles.

A bad trip may be the closest description I can find, though I know that's inadequate and inaccurate.

Sink also got me thinking about mental illness in this part of the world.

There's not nearly enough awareness on mental illness as a medical condition in this region, especially amongst the masses. In some social circles, when someone starts to fall apart, the first reading isn't always the person is ill and needs a doctor. It's that something has gotten into them. Till today some families' first move would be a sheikh or priest (religious authority) before a doctor. The suffering for the ill person doubles, first the deterioration, then the misreading of it.

This impulse to read mental illness religiously or spiritually rather than scientifically, isn't uniquely Arab. It's deeply human. The Exorcism of Emily Rose built its whole premise on that uncertainty and never resolved it. So the impulse doesn't belong to one geography. What differs is the weight it carries, and the stigma attached to it.

And then there's the new stigma. The good-vibes-and-organic-only crowd who treat psychiatric care as a failure of willpower. The healers who claim to cure what they don't understand. The friends who say medication is just a band-aid while someone they love quietly fades. Psychiatric medication doesn't cure. But for some people, it's what makes living possible. A bearable path toward some kind of recovery. The shame around the illness, even around seeing a psychiatrist, costs lives.

This is why a film like Sink matters. It doesn't hand you a sob story to cry at and forget. It shakes you into realizing how complicated it is. No clear answers. No easy fixes.

Even when people stabilize, another struggle begins: the pressure to appear as though nothing happened. They're expected to hold a job, get married and attend social functions wearing a smile.

The world doesn't make space for someone in recovery; it asks them to perform recovered. So they stop treatment too early, hide their illness, and push themselves into a version of life their mind isn't built for. Then again, maybe none of our minds were built for this.

Arab cinema and tv have touched on mental illness before and done it well: Asef Lel Ez3ag (Sorry to Disturb), Soqoot Hor (Free Fall), Ansaf Maganeen (Half Crazies), Basma, and others. But even the good ones mostly tell us about the illness. Sink commits its entire film form to it: the frames, the sound, the silence. It's one of the very few that ask us not to just watch illness, but to LIVE it.

From an industry perspective, Sink is the kind of film producers are looking for: authentically local, universally felt. The textures are Jordanian. The family dynamic, the silence around diagnosis, the bargaining a mother does with herself before saying the word doctor. But the emotional weight could land anywhere. Someone in Buenos Aires or Seoul could watch this film and recognize their own family in it. I hope Sink gets the attention it deserves when it's released.

Come to think of it, Hollywood often does the opposite of what Sink does. A Beautiful Mind won an Oscar for its depiction of John Nash's life. But much of it wasn't true. His wife had divorced him during the years the film shows them together. The Nobel Committee never let him give a speech, worried his instability would cause a scene. The pen ceremony was invented for the film.

When a film sensationalizes this territory, turning a grave struggle into an arc that comforts and entertains, it belittles the real people living it. It puts pressure on those suffering to perform "normal," when simply surviving is the success.

On the other hand, A Woman Under the Influence refuses to organize the chaos into dramatic beats. The Whale keeps you in discomfort longer than you'd choose. I Swear takes Tourette's, where the symptoms are visible, audible, hard to look past, and still makes what lies underneath these symptoms the real subject of the film.

And sometimes one scene does more than a whole film. In the series The Pitt, a social worker talks to a father whose son is being diagnosed with a serious mental illness. She tells him about her own daughter who was studying architecture at Georgetown until her first episode. She's now living a stable-ish life as a cashier at a grocery store. Not triumphant. Not inspirational. Not the life anyone had pictured for her. But a real one, with moments of happiness every now and then.

That one scene lands harder than whole films Hollywood has made about mental illness.

Because lighter films often tend to perform better than intense ones, illness gets diluted for the audience's comfort. We want to empathize, but from a safe distance. To be moved without being touched.

Charity from the recliner or the fancy philanthropic gala in designer gowns and suits. Empathy that costs nothing.

The older I get, the less interesting I find careers and the more interesting I find lives.

We celebrate climbing. We don't celebrate staying afloat, especially for those to whom climbing isn't an option, or those climbing while their own minds fights them. Both are success, but only one gets applause.

To stay functional when your mind works against you, in an unsympathetic world, might be the highest form of success there is. Especially when no one can see how hard someone is kicking underneath.

I don't want to avoid someone like Basil. I want to sit with him. Listen. Get to know different ways of living beyond this one "normal" we go along with.

Maybe I'm becoming increasingly disenchanted with the version of "normal" we all perform. And selfishly speaking, I'm bored. Bored of the conversations about promotions and property prices, about what someone paid for their car, and a longer list better kept between me and my notes app.

A bit selfish. Fine. Most of what we humans do is.

But that's the thing about all of it: the promotions, the titles, the status we measure each other by. None of it takes into consideration the invisible struggles and invisible successes. Some people will never have a title, and that says nothing about who they are and what they carry.

Next to what someone like Basil carries, or what Nadia does, "what do you do" feels like a very small question to open a conversation with.