There’s a scene in “Shook” in which the drama’s lead tells a Toronto hipster that he lives in Scarborough. Her response — “Oooh, Scarborough” — comes off as if he just name-dropped a war zone.
“That literally happened to me,” says director and co-writer Amar Wala, who grew up in the multicultural east-Toronto suburb.
“I didn’t know that Scarborough had this dangerous reputation growing up. To me, it was just Scarborough. It was fine.”
The moment stuck with him.
“I told myself, ‘I’m going to put this in a movie one day.’ It took a while, but here it is.”
“Shook” stars Saamer Usmani as Ash, a South Asian twentysomething trying to make it as a novelist while navigating his family’s unravelling, a romantic entanglement and the quiet class divisions of the Greater Toronto Area.
The film, out Friday, draws from a turbulent stretch in Wala’s mid-20s, when he was chasing his filmmaking dreams amid his parents’ divorce and his father’s subsequent Parkinson’s diagnosis.
“It was a lot of things all hitting at once, when you’re supposed to figure out what it means to be an adult,” Wala says in a virtual call from Toronto.
“At the time, I was doing what I think a lot of us do when we’re writers: travel downtown, sit in coffee shops, write — or pretend to write most of the time — and figure out what it actually means to be a working artist.”
Despite his proximity to the city’s cultural core, Wala says breaking into the arts community felt like trying to push through an invisible wall.
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Wala says he wanted to make a Toronto film that captured the subtle, everyday obstacles that come with being “a brown kid from the suburbs.”
One recurring gag sees South Asian characters give baristas a “fake white name” that’s easy to write on coffee cups.
“It’s stuff I felt was relatable to a lot of people who live just on the outside of major cities, where you might as well be from another state,” he says.
“That distance may be short in terms of kilometres — you can see the skyline — but you’re not that connected to the arts community or to the power structures or the money of the city, and so that distance feels gigantic.”
When Wala started out more than a decade ago, he had no industry connections and no clear path in. While he aspired to make narrative features, documentaries offered a more accessible entry point.
His debut doc, 2014’s “The Secret Trial 5,” examines Canada’s post-9/11 use of security certificates to imprison Muslim men without charge.
“Shook,” Wala’s debut scripted feature, co-written with Adnan Khan, isn’t overtly political. Instead, it centres on Ash’s personal coming-of-age as he explores a budding romance with barista Claire, played by Amy Forsyth, while trying to deal with the emotional debris left by his parents, played by Bernard White and Pamela Mala Sinha.
Still, the film captures the invisible systems that shape who gets to feel at home in a city like Toronto.
When Ash and his friends miss the last subway train home, they must weather the chaos of the night bus — known colloquially as “the vomit comet.”
“It just seems silly that last call is at 2 a.m. but the subway shuts down at 1:30. That tells you who they’re actually thinking about when they build these systems,” Wala says.
“Shook” joins a growing wave of Canadian films set in Scarborough — including 2021’s “Scarborough,” 2022’s “Brother” and this year’s “Morningside” — and does so with a self-aware nod to its cinematic company.
“The ends are hot right now,” a publisher tells Ash as he pitches a novel set in the east-end suburb.
Wala suspects Scarborough artists are feeling more pride after years of being “on the outside looking in.” But he’s wary of how quickly the industry can turn authenticity into formula.
“As soon as they realize, ‘Oh, there’s an audience for this stuff,’ they only want to give you the same version of that thing over and over again,” he says.
“They don’t understand it’s a diversity of perspectives from these places that the audience is craving.”
Wala hopes “Shook” challenges the narrow, often dreary portrayals of the area by presenting Scarborough as he remembers it: vibrant, lived-in, lush.
“People say to me, like, ‘Scarborough looks so good in the movie. You shot it so beautifully.’ And I’m like, I didn’t do anything to it,” he says.
“We just used some nice lenses and colour corrected it. It looks gorgeous because that’s what it looks like. A lot of those bleak depictions of it — you have to go out of your way to make it look like that.”
© 2025 The Canadian Press
