In the Shadows review – true tale of Ramla Ali’s remarkable rise through the boxing ranks is a knockout

The true-life success story of boxer Ramla Ali is confidently told in this capable picture from screenwriter Ursula Rani Sarma and documentary director Anthony Wonke, in his feature-film debut. Ali is the British-Somali boxer who escaped to the UK from the Somali civil war with her family as a refugee, and in 2021 became the first person to box for Somalia at Olympic Games. The boxing significance of her last name is actually not mentioned in the film – and I never noticed it until it flashed up in a kind of “fight card” intertitle before her first competitive bout.

She is fiercely played by Jasmine Jobson, from TV’s Top Boy; her supportive white Muslim-convert husband Richard – a hugely important figure in enabling Ramla to break away from her disapproving family and do as she wants – is played by Finn Cole, and her abusive trainer Clinton is Gershwyn Eustache Jr. This is a film that takes you through the classic boxing-movie scenes fluently enough: the nervous first appearance in the gym, the overbearing quasi-parental coach, the heartstopping fight debut. It was good to see the traditional closeup of post-fight sore fists in the ice-bucket. All in all, the film works better than Giant, the recent biopic of British-Yemeni boxer Prince Naseem, who is in fact briefly mentioned here.

But devotees of the boxing film could be wondering … when will we see the all-important scene showing the boxer receive the character-building experience of failure? Of actually getting beaten? Well, Ramla suffers a concussion during a sparring match, but only because sinister and controlling Clinton deliberately puts her in the ring with someone of a higher weight class.

This, though, is a boxing film with a difference and not just due to gender. Young Ramla fundamentally has to learn to box in secret. Her family would never allow such a pastime for a Muslim girl; she lives at home, with a job in a legal firm, having to train after work and telling her mum she is being kept late at the office. She genuinely appears to have no plan for what to do when they find out, although the idea of marrying Richard may have been a more fully formed idea than the film suggests. This means there is a layer of concealment and denial that doesn’t exist in women’s boxing films like, say, Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby with Hilary Swank or David Michôd’s Christy with Sydney Sweeney. There, the female boxer’s vocation, though naturally fraught with danger and patriarchal disapproval, is not frowned upon in the same way by her own community; perhaps a working-class white woman from a tough (but secular) background can afford to fight and has less (or nothing) to lose. That was not the case for Ali.

In the Shadows is perhaps not groundbreaking, but it is a film with a real story to tell: a story about the pain that Ali suffered as a child in Somalia and the heartbreak the family endured there, revealed indirectly in flashback, which was mysteriously transformed into her determination to box her way out of the tragic past. It is a strong performance from Jobson.