Ramla Ali's story is extraordinary enough that the film's job is mostly to stay out of its own way — and In the Shadows largely manages it. Ali escaped the Somali civil war as a child, settled in the UK, trained in secret while holding down a legal job and lying to her mother about late nights at the office, and in 2021 became the first person to compete for Somalia at an Olympic Games. That is a story with genuine dramatic architecture built in. Jasmine Jobson, best known from Top Boy, carries the film with a performance that is physically committed and emotionally precise. She doesn't play Ali as a symbol or a sermon; she plays her as a young woman making one consequential decision at a time, often without a clear plan for what comes next. The film is honest about that — Ramla's concealment strategy has no real endgame, and the film doesn't pretend otherwise. Where In the Shadows earns its distinction is in that layer of concealment. Classic women's boxing films like Million Dollar Baby or the more recent Christy stage the female boxer's struggle against external patriarchal forces — coaches, promoters, the sport itself. Here, the disapproval is internal to Ramla's own community and family. The vocation is not simply dangerous or unladylike; it is framed as incompatible with who she is supposed to be. That produces a different dramatic texture, quieter and more claustrophobic, and the film handles it well. The boxing-film grammar is executed fluently — the nervous gym debut, the overbearing coach (Gershwyn Eustache Jr.'s Clinton is properly sinister rather than merely demanding), the ice-bucket hands after the first bout. Director Anthony Wonke, making his fiction feature debut after a career in documentary, keeps the camera honest. Where the film runs into the genre's gravitational pull is in the treatment of failure: Ramla's concussion comes via Clinton's deliberate sabotage rather than an honest defeat, which softens the character-building-through-loss arc that the boxing film normally insists on. That's a consequence of the source material — her actual record is exceptional — but it leaves a slight void where the film's central trial should be. Finn Cole as Richard, Ramla's white Muslim-convert husband, gets the balance right: present and enabling without becoming the film's real protagonist. The Somalia backstory is handled in restrained flashback, which is the correct choice — the weight of it lands without becoming trauma spectacle. The Guardian's reviewer notes, correctly, that the film works better than Giant, the recent Naseem Hamed biopic, and that's a fair comparison point: this is a more coherent piece of work with a cleaner emotional line. It is in UK and Irish cinemas from 30 October, following its London Film Festival premiere.
