Apnas (2026)

This has plenty of ingredients for a solid thriller, but except for a last fifteen minutes that is quite tense, this is more of a soap opera. It’s all about the handsome accountant “Awais” (James Greaney) who has lost his job, again. This causes problems for his family as his taxi driving dad is also so much in debt that he loses his car. Meantime, his flamboyant and thuggish cousin “MK” (Asim Ashraf) lives the life of a millionaire. His father “Zafar” (Rehan Sheikh) is an unscrupulous Pakistani politician whose drug dealing enterprises throughout England’s North West has made him a very wealthy man. Faced with imminent homelessness for himself and his family, “Awais” talks to his uncle about maybe working for his operation, and soon he is driving a Porsche; they are all living in a grand home and all for him doing some “washing”. This all might have gone smoothly and allowed him to continue his illicit, but loving, relationship with his mum’s nurse “Eleanor” (Mollie Winnard) but unfortunately “MK” is a bit of a loose cannon, and when he over-reaches himself and then falls foul of the competition in Bradford, things take a turn for the more violent and fatal. Now you might be wondering where the constabulary are in all of this? Well it just so happens that the enthusiastic young detective “Abbas” (Ijaz Rana) has joined the local team under his policing hero “Javid” (Ash Tandon) bent on getting to the bottom of their lucrative crime ring, but it’s soon fairly clear that he is facing more than his fair share of obstacles. Scene set, what follows is all a rather undercooked and very verbose drama that jumps about between it’s plentiful threads whilst developing very by way of characterisation. Sure, it does illustrate the toxic impact of wealth and addiction, but just why “Awais” turns into someone quite so unpleasant isn’t really explained - and that’s actually quite important to the latter stages of the plot. The rest of the story has a disappointing inevitability to it, too, and the storylines between both “Awais” and his girlfriend and that with “MK” vacillates implausibly from scene to scene. The cop thread isn’t very much better developed, either - indeed, that’s fairly obvious right from the start and “Prime Suspect” it isn’t. At times it does get closer to the mark and you might even to start to think you cared about some of these folk, but that feeling doesn’t last for long and for the most part this is just plain dull.