Stometer Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Pluskylang Great Film overall

Humaira Grant It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

Cristal The movie really just wants to entertain people.

Edward Hall The protagonist in this story is a mess, but he's not the kind of mess worth your time. Born in India and now living in the U.S, he's a homosexual Muslim trying to reconcile this dissonance while documenting his pilgrimage to Mecca.It's not just a documentary about himself though, it's a story about Islam and how it's been interpreted by different cultures.In the process of his trip, we're led down this path thinking that he is going to be the exception to the "Muslim extremists" that we're all told are a minority. He highlights the draconian punishments that are widespread in Islamic countries (i.e. be-headings for being a homosexual), and shows that the religion has been hijacked and advocates reform. (Sadly, the only injustices he really highlights in a religion full of violence and repression are the ones pertaining to homosexuality, which is merely the tip of the iceberg.)He tries so hard to make Islam not look like a universally insane and heartless ideology via his own anecdotal perspective of being an "outsider" Muslim--though it's a difficult argument to buy as he constantly talks to his super power throughout the film. We meet him and his husband and they both seem like pretty typical people with rather average American lives.So he goes to Mecca to be forgiven for his sins and in the process he mostly just highlights how distanced he is from the Islamic order in this part of the world and expresses dismay. He almost makes us think that he might abandon the faith after this unpleasant experience at Mecca.We see all of the insane behaviors that are part of the standard pilgrimage, and he films it in a way that casts doubt on these practices.BUT WE WERE TRICKED!!!It turns out, these religious practices at Mecca weren't extreme enough!!!In one of the final scenes we see him so disappointed that he wasn't able to barbarically kill a goat with his own hands in the name of his faith, that he travels from Saudi Arabia to India to finish his salvation. After this very disturbing scene, he then realizes that what he just did was terribly violent and wrong, yet he finishes out the film praising the same ghost who told him to sacrifice an innocent goat in the first place. This film is full of reasons why Islam is a religion to abandon quickly. Unfortunately here, the lessons were completely lost on our narrator.

AnnB Just finished watching this. You get used to the grainy, hand-held camera after awhile and become totally absorbed into a story that has never been told before. The film, for me, opened doors into a secret world that I never thought I could enter. I felt like I was there with him in Mecca. Not only is this guy brave, he is also a great filmmaker. He successfully creates a story line including his very personal life into a film that could have ended up being a travelogue. This film is not a travelogue. You will be mesmerized. Even my teenage daughter was. Central to it, is a search of the spirit and it does something I like in movies, which is the ending does not answer all your questions. Its an open ending to a film that is anything but traditional.

cranstonbrian Having watched this filmmakers previous film A Jihad for Love, I was very curious to see this. Just saw it on Netflix and the film is still haunting me. This is probably one of the most morally complex and visually rich documentaries I have ever seen. The courage of the filmmaker is never in doubt, his morality as it relates to Islam is. This film takes us on an extraordinary journey through the protagonist who is also the filmmaker. Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia come remarkably alive through his hidden cellphone footage.There is a visceral, dreamlike quality throughout and the filmmaker is not afraid of cinematic abstraction. The film remarkably avoids self indulgence which would be easy given its nature. The love story that lies at the heart of the film is beautifully depicted. An unknown world in Saudi Arabia opens up to us and the result is like we too are clandestine viewers--we are disobediently peeping into the forbidden. The musical choices are remarkable--he even uses heavy metal at one point. Many sequences are extremely hard to watch but they are underlined by a deep dignity. Being mostly shot on an iPhone as the voice over tells us could be a distraction but the filmmaker actually turns it into one of the biggest assets of the film. We become witnesses to a forbidden journey that is built carefully like a thriller spanning New York, Saudi Arabia and India. I personally come out of this film more enlightened and with a strong feeling that I have witnessed something I was not meant to see. The Hajj of the film is visceral and brutal. But in Mecca there is also peace and completion. My only peeve with the film: he could have chosen to show more of his life as a gay Muslim man married to an atheist and living in New York.

JoshuaDysart It's pretty obvious from the low IMDb ranking overall that zealotry will be a dominating force in the discussion over this film, which is a shame. Objectively it's not as substantive a movie as I would've liked. It swings pretty haphazardly from personal home movies, to attempts at poetic visual memoir, to the hajj itself (by far the most interesting bits), all shot on an iPhone, which while necessary for the undercover filmmaking in the Kingdom, doesn't add a very strong visual presence to the other 70% of the flick. There's some very brief exploration of how Wahhabist ideas came to gain such a strong foothold across much of the faith but that takes a backseat to Thanksgiving dinner footage and other humanizing, but pretty boring filler. All and all it doesn't deserve the extremely low ranking it's sporting now, simply as an act of personal filmmaking it has some value, but it's also not really that strong a work considering how interesting the subject matter is. One thing is certain, we need more love in the world.