Ramla Ali tells her mother that work is running late, then goes to train. Her job at a legal firm provides an acceptable explanation for the missing hours; boxing would require a conversation she cannot yet afford to have. Anthony Wonke’s In the Shadows, written by Ursula Rani Sarma, gives its British-Somali protagonist a peculiar timetable. She must fit the person she wants to become into the hours left over from being the daughter her family expects. An employer can apparently claim her evenings with considerably less discussion than she can.
The arrangement has an expiry date. Ramla wants to compete, win, and be recognized, achievements that would expose the activity she is concealing. Each improvement brings her closer to a confrontation for which she seems to have made little preparation. Secrecy buys her opportunities without securing her independence. There is something painfully credible about pursuing a future while hoping its consequences will somehow sort themselves out.
Her family’s objections initially invite an easy reading: restrictive tradition obstructs individual freedom, and sporting success will prove the restrictions foolish. The repeated arguments about appropriate behavior and community reputation give that interpretation plenty of support. Yet Hodan Yusuf’s performance as Ramla’s mother makes it difficult to settle comfortably into contempt. Her protectiveness comes with affection, and the extended confrontation between Ramla and her parents gives that affection time to complicate the dispute. Their resistance hurts because these relationships matter to her.
I found myself having to revise the idea that independence here means escape. Ramla’s concealment preserves her connection to the household even as it permits her to disobey it. She wants room to act without surrendering her place within the family. That makes the parental reckoning the film’s richest dramatic encounter: an ambition previously managed through excuses must become something they can discuss openly. Love offers no automatic agreement, and the scene gains force from allowing care and restriction to occupy the same conversation.
The Somali wedding celebration helps give that family world a life beyond its objections. Community exists through celebration and attachment as well as judgment. Ramla’s assertion of British identity and her desire to compete for Team GB sit alongside her Somali background and Muslim faith.
These affiliations resist the tidy sorting exercise that inspirational films sometimes perform, placing every inherited attachment on the side of repression. The film is less curious about her private religious experience than about the expectations surrounding it, though. Faith becomes clearest when other people invoke it to shape her conduct.
Jasmine Jobson holds these pressures together through a performance whose determination has a composed, practical quality. Ramla’s legal work and her exchanges with her family give that composure a setting; she has learned to function inside expectations while withholding a significant part of herself. Jobson makes her resistance convincing without turning every disagreement into a declaration. The writing provides a clearer account of what Ramla will persist through than of the doubts she carries, leaving the performance to supply some of the complexity between those positions.
The gym also unsettles the simple liberation story. Clinton, played by Gershwyn Eustache Jr, offers the access Ramla needs, then treats his authority as a claim upon her. His jealousy around Richard and the sparring session against a heavier opponent expose the danger of depending on someone who confuses assistance with possession. The concussion makes that confusion physical. She has entered a place where her ambition can develop, and the person entrusted with developing it can use the conditions of training against her.
Clinton’s conduct is clear; the character is less fully examined. The film establishes coercion through the mismatch in the ring, yet gives limited attention to the progression from encouragement to entitlement. That leaves him functioning chiefly as another impediment Ramla must overcome. A film so attentive to the mixed feelings inside family authority could have brought similar precision to professional authority, where legitimate instruction supplies such convenient cover for control.
Richard and her younger brother Yasin keep this from becoming a blanket account of male obstruction. Their support matters, especially beside Clinton’s behavior. Finn Cole gives Richard warmth, and his growing closeness to Ramla supplies relief from the pressure elsewhere. Still, the movement from gym ally to romantic partner receives less development than the household conflict. His difficult family background is sketched rather than explored. He becomes dependable before he becomes particularly legible, which weakens a relationship carrying a substantial share of the film’s promise of independence.
The returns to Somalia create a different problem of explanation. The childhood pursuit by soldiers and the recurring revelation of family tragedy establish suffering that belongs to Ramla’s history. Placing those memories within her sporting rise suggests a connection between trauma and determination, but the connection remains thin. Endurance is easy to recognize once someone succeeds; explaining how a particular desire grows from loss is harder. The flashbacks give the ambition emotional weight without fully clarifying why boxing becomes its expression.
Wonke is on firmer ground with the routines of learning and competition: the first gym encounters, training bouts, the competitive debut, sore fists cooled in an ice bucket. Those details give effort a physical scale. Clinton’s dangerous sparring arrangement, however, makes injury an experience of betrayal rather than a fair test of Ramla’s sporting limits. The film develops the struggle for permission with greater specificity than the struggle to discover what her ability can withstand.
Its treatment of the major event in Botswana follows that emphasis. The competition is reported rather than staged as the grand fight toward which everything has been building. Keeping it offscreen leaves the domestic confrontation and the training relationships with much of the dramatic weight. It also asks us to accept sporting achievement at a distance, after spending so much time close to the conditions that made it possible. Ramla can finally become publicly visible while the decisive public occasion remains outside our view.
In the Shadows premiered at the BFI London Film Festival on October 9, 2026, ahead of its theatrical release across the United Kingdom and Ireland on October 30, 2026, distributed by True Brit Entertainment. The biographical sports drama tells the true story of British-Somali boxer Ramla Ali, chronicling her escape from war-torn Somalia as a child and her journey to becoming a pioneer for women’s boxing while balancing family expectations and personal trauma.
Full Credits
Title: In the Shadows
Distributor: True Brit Entertainment
Release date: October 9, 2026 (BFI London Film Festival), October 30, 2026 (United Kingdom)
Rating: 15 (BBFC)
Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes (117 minutes)
Director: Anthony Wonke
Writers: Ursula Rani Sarma
Producers and Executive Producers: Lee Magiday, Madeleine Sanderson
Cast: Jasmine Jobson, Finn Cole, Gershwyn Eustache Jnr, Hodan Yusuf, Roda Asha Aden
Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Christopher Aoun
Editors: Kristina Hetherington, John Gilbert
Composer: Walter Mair
The Review
In the Shadows
In the Shadows earns its emotional force through the difficulty of pursuing freedom without losing the people one loves. Jobson’s composed determination and the parental confrontation give that conflict substance. I’m less persuaded by the film’s explanations of Clinton’s control, Richard’s devotion, and trauma’s relationship to ambition. Its attention to the conditions that permit achievement is sharper than its account of achievement itself.
PROS
- Family conflict allows affection and restriction to coexist.
- Jobson gives Ramla’s resistance practical conviction.
- Secret training brings specificity to the sporting narrative.
CONS
- Clinton’s shift from encouragement to possession lacks development.
- The romance carries weight its development cannot fully support.
- Flashbacks leave trauma’s connection to boxing insufficiently explored.
