This Malaysia-made movie aims to bring awareness to living with autism, written and directed by Tunku Mona Riza as her directorial debut.
Riza has a good eye in framing and capturing a scene. Her style in direction weaves in and out of between being an independent film and a documentary. What I'm most impressed with is the consistency in the pacing from beginning to end, with the ending wrapping up the movie nicely with a bow.
The casting of real-life husband and wife, Nam Ron and June Lojong, was a very nice touch as straight away there is that real chemistry. Child actor Harith Haziq in his first movie was amazing playing an autistic child. But credits has to go to Riza as well for shielding any limitations of Haziq and only showing the best performances of his.
Ruminah Sidek, who played the senior in the resort, was a scene-stealer as she brought a bit of levity as well as depth to her scenes.
But as a movie to entertain, I found the movie way too long. For what the movie was about and how the story was told, an hour and a half was quite sufficient but the total running time of Redha was closer to two hours.
Also the dialogue needed to be fleshed out a lot more as there were a lot of potential for a few of the tear-jerking scenes to go deeper, as well as for the rest of the dialogue to feel more real instead of just having the actors say a few lines and followed by silence.
Still, the silence accompanied the overall tone of the movie enough to not have it feel too out of place.
However, the biggest complaint I have would be the way all the "informative" scenes were revealed. Everything was very on the nose and left nothing to the imagination. If that was a conscious choice then it's a matter of taste. But otherwise it's overkill.
Overall, a very generic storyline but well acted and came with some beautiful shots and locales. If Riza continues on this path and explore her talents, she could go far.
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