In the Shadows review: Jasmine Jobson lands Ramla Ali's story

Jasmine Jobson plays British-Somali boxer Ramla Ali in "In the Shadows," screenwriter Ursula Rani Sarma and documentary director Anthony Wonke's retelling of Ali's rise from refugee to Olympic history-maker. The Guardian's review calls the film "a knockout."

Ali escaped to the UK from the Somali civil war with her family as a refugee. In 2021 she became the first person to box for Somalia at an Olympic Games. Strikingly, the film itself never addresses the boxing significance of her surname — the Guardian's reviewer notes he only registered it when it flashed up in a "fight card" intertitle before her first competitive bout.

Who plays whom?

The cast is led by three performances the review singles out:

• Jasmine Jobson (known from TV's "Top Boy") as Ramla Ali, in a performance the reviewer says is "fiercely played" and one in which she "goes the distance"
• Finn Cole as Richard, Ali's supportive white Muslim-convert husband, described as "a hugely important figure in enabling Ramla to break away from her disapproving family and do as she wants"
• Gershwyn Eustache Jr. as Clinton, her abusive trainer

The film charts Ali's battles on two fronts: pain from her past and her family's disapproval of her boxing.

How does it handle the boxing-movie formula?

Wonke, making his feature-film debut after a documentary career, guides the story through what the review calls "the classic boxing-movie scenes fluently enough": the nervous first appearance in the gym, the overbearing quasi-parental coach, the heart-stopping fight debut. The reviewer welcomed one genre touch in particular: "It was good to see the traditional closeup of post-fight sore fists in the ice-bucket."

The Guardian describes the overall result as a "heavyweight, tick-the-boxes production" — confident and capable, if built from familiar beats.

How does it compare with other boxing biopics?

The review makes one direct comparison: "In the Shadows" works better than "Giant," the recent biopic of British-Yemeni boxer Prince Naseem. Naseem himself receives a brief mention in Ali's film.

With Sarma's script grounding the story and Jobson's lead performance carrying it, "In the Shadows" adds a further chapter to the current run of British boxing biopics — one centered, for once, on a woman who made Olympic history for Somalia.