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Tucked somewhere within Mera Lyari’s overly long 90-minute runtime is a much better film. Good luck finding it, though. Like Waldo from Where’s Waldo? it exists — but you have to really squint to see where it hides.

Abu Aleeha’s 10th (or is it 11th?) directorial feature — I’ve lost count by now — is a notch better than Taxali Gate, his previous big-screen venture produced by and starring Ayesha Omar.

Omar returns here as executive producer and actor, playing Behnaz, an ex-footballer-turned-national coach. However, unlike Taxali Gate, her presence is negligible, despite being billed as front-and-centre alongside the film’s lead, Dananeer Mobeen.

Dananeer is the glue — no, make that super-glue — holding together this exceedingly thin story of a girl from Lyari named Afsana, who dreams of playing pro-football and who ultimately gets selected. That is the entire gist. One wishes there were more — both in terms of the story and football.

Despite star Dananeer Mobeen’s valiant attempts to kick it into the stratosphere, Mera Lyari, which champions female empowerment and football, stumbles like all of director Abu Aleeha’s films

Surrounding Afsana is a familiar assortment of clichés. There’s her bad-but-good dad Arif Baloch (Nayyar Ejaz, delivering a hammy, over-the-top performance) — a bad-tempered rickshaw driver who lashes out because his backwardness opposes his daughter’s athletic ambitions. Then there’s her sympathetic mother Shakira Hussain (Samiya Mumtaz), who desperately wants a son and shares a bizarrely candid bond with her daughter — who doesn’t shy away from making uncomfortable, misplaced jokes about her parents’ sex life. A passing subplot also shoehorns predatory fake babas and taaveez (charms) meant to help women conceive boys.

Afsana’s best friend, Kashmala (Trinette Lucas), looks too refined, with model-perfect skin and make-up, to be from the lower-middle-class Lyari; like her bestie, she’s also a footballer and faces the familial pressure of being married off in her mid-teens to a much older man. Though her character suffers from the same superficiality as the rest of the cast, she gets a semblance of a happy ending that smooths things out — and thankfully, Lucas proves to be a genuine acting find.

The film loudly proclaims its theme of female empowerment and entirely discards romantic subplots. Men — with the minor exception of Behnaz’s assistant (Shoaib Hassan) — are largely portrayed as villains. To accentuate this, we get a nefarious neighbour, Faiq Khan (Adnan Shah Tipu), and Behnaz’s ex-husband (Paras Masroor), who shatters her leg in a flashback within a flashback — yes, really — that ends her career.

In those flashbacks, Behnaz lives in a modest Lyari home like Afsana. Yet, in the present, she resides in a posh house after returning from London. Unless the Pakistani government has secretly started handing out massive stipends to female footballers, a huge chunk of that story is missing. I suspect the latter.

Aleeha, a journalist-turned-filmmaker, has never been an astute screenwriter. Despite his staggering number of works, his scripts still feel like first drafts — good ideas hastily written and fed straight into the production grinder. His films always have one saving grace — Asrad Khan’s reliably strong cinematography — but are ultimately wrecked by the editing, music and sound design.

Here, apart from Asrad, there are two more technical pluses: the minimalist production design that suits the story’s naturalistic tone, and Ehtasham Mallick’s surprisingly dimensional surround sound mastering, even if the music cues fade in and out inelegantly.

Shayan Masood’s choppy editing is subpar and ineffective. The nested flashbacks and a disorienting 10-minute sequence — where four scenes with starkly different characters, emotions and tones happening simultaneously are mashed together — will make your head throb. It’s simply too much creative indulgence for a poor reviewer to bear.

Still, Aleeha has improved as a director. His aesthetic approach to blocking and performance has noticeably matured, and his greatest assets remain his actors. Mumtaz, Masroor, Lucas and (in a few scenes) Omar do genuinely elevate the material.

However, it is Dananeer who (pardon the pun) tries her valiant best to kick the film into the stratosphere. Despite occasional slips in her accent, her debut is a smashing breakthrough. She displays range, sincerity and a maturity that many actors fail to muster even after years on screen.

At times, she makes you believe the impossible: that the creative slip-ups and the glaring lack of actual football matches and training are trifling matters. She makes you believe there’s a better movie hidden inside this barebones production that boasts about as much (if not less) plot and production values than a standard telefilm.

Chances are you won’t find it, but watching Dananeer give the film her all, you can’t help but wish it were hiding somewhere just out of plain sight, behind the goal post.

Produced by Waqas Hassan Rizvi and Sania Sohail and released by Distribution Club, Mera Lyari is rated PG. It features loud, adult language and scenes that heavily champion female empowerment.

Originally published in Dawn, ICON, May 17th, 2026