Metacritic reviews

Jinn is the rare coming-of-age story that doesn’t simply pat kids on the head and tell them they just need to love themselves. Instead, Mu’min holds her characters accountable for the way they discombobulate each other’s lives, while giving them the space to do better, if they can figure out what better is.

Jinn is a familiar story, told in a cultural context rarely depicted on film, and Mu’min’s approach is so lyrical and empathetic that it feels completely fresh and new. It’s a remarkable film with sensitive and stirring turns by Renee and Missick in the mother-daughter roles.

Jinn holds several beautiful elements, especially in its central mother-daughter story.

For the most part, Mu’min’s script is pleasantly inquisitive, and its refusal to arrive at easy answers is its engine. Jinn is a special little film, one that never lets its complicated, contradictory characters become abstractions, but instead revels in all the disparate elements that make them who they are.

There’s nothing preachy about Jinn, even though Nijla Mu’min’s elegant debut feature is about a teenager coming to terms with her mother’s newly embraced religion.

Jinn may end a little too neatly after challenging so many of the conventions of its genre, but it’s easy enough to look past.

Equally importantly, it shows how much an artist like Mu’min can bring to otherwise well-trod material, and how valuable underrepresented points of view like hers really are.

At a time when Islam has become weaponized as a synonym for ISIS, we need glimpses at its positivity and humanity. That doesn’t mean Mu’min sanitizes things (a lot happens that could reinforce reductive stereotypes of social conservatism and familial oppression), only that she’s creating healthy representations at once relatable, laudable, and flawed. Nothing is black and white.

Jinn consistently lets down its premise and performers with a by-the-numbers-at-best screenplay that triple-underlines all of its forward-thinking themes.