Polite Society’s silliest fight was inspired by a grotesque horror film

Ria Kansara, a young stuntwoman who aspires to be a star in the film Polite SocietyRia, who is a good-natured girl and loves her older sister Lena as much as she does (Ritu arya), has an understandable reaction to her family arranging a marriage for her and the man. She wants Ria to stop the wedding and smack the crap out of him.

Ria’s fear of losing Lena might appear to be a response that is over the top, but it actually serves as an excuse to engage in Matrix style combat. But Lena’s mysterious fiance Salim (Akshay Khanna) and his imposing mother Raheela (Nimra Bucha) do actually seem to be up to something nefarious, with Ria and her loyal friends as the only people who can save Lena from her doom. Director Nida Manzoor weaves all this into an action-packed comedy that’s as much about kicking ass as it is about grappling with big life changes.

One of the most brutal fights in the whole movie isn’t between Ria and her foes, but between Ria and her sister. It starts as a sibling fight, and escalates to the point where the two sisters go head-to-head against walls, even crashing through a broken door. It’s chaotic, bloody, unapologetically brutal, and absolutely over the top. (Meanwhile, Ria and Lena’s parents, hanging out downstairs, simply sigh and tell them to clean up the rubble they create.)

Photo: Parisa Taghizadeh/Focus Features

“It was one of my favorite scenes to film,” Manzoor tells Polygon. “I found it incredibly cathartic to write everything with these two sisters.”

Random objects in Lena’s room become unexpected weapons in the fight, from a picture frame to a heated hair straightener. Lena’s childhood bedroom is just as much a part of the action of the scene as the two girls, something Manzoor felt was especially important.

“I was also inspired a lot by Jackie Chan movies,” says Manzoor. “And what he does is really use his environment in a fight. This helps to ground a scene because the actor uses pieces of set. That’s why I wanted to have the hair straightener involved. I wanted a frame that had the two of them in it [turned into a weapon]It inspired me to ground the fight in its truth.” It inspired me to ground the fight in its truth.”

All the battle in Polite SocietyManzoor recalled her favourite action film sequences. One scene she kept coming back to was the fight between Morpheus and Neo in 1999’s You can also find out more about the following: MatrixShe says that scene introduced her to Hong Kong film and fight choreographer WooPing Yuen. She also cites Daryl Hannah and Uma Thurman’s showdown in Kill Bill Vol. 2They trash a car as they fight each other, then there is a scene where the two men try to get rid of one another. HaywireWhere a fight between Gina Carano & Michael Fassbender tears apart an entire hotel room.

“[Carano] has true physicality that oftentimes we don’t see when women are cast as action heroes. They don’t always feel like they have the physical strength to do the things that they do,” says Manzoor. “I was inspired by that. My actors were to perform as many stunts themselves as possible. It was important to me that they fully embody the fight sequences, and feel like an authentic performer. That was important to me.”

But the fight that really sparked the sister-on-sister action for Manzoor came from Julia Ducournau’s cannibal horror drama Raw. The genre of the film, a body horror movie is radically different than the comedy-action-comedy vibes that were present in Polite SocietyBoth movies feature a pair sisters and show the brutality that can be found in certain situations. Raw’s sister fight really resonated with Manzoor.

“There’s a brilliant sister fight,” she says. “It’s a kind of horror version of it, but they’re like biting each other — bleeding and biting pieces out of each other. And I remember being like,This fight is so violent that it makes me feel overwhelmed.. It made me feel empowered to go even further with my sister fight.”

Polite SocietyThe movie is now in cinemas.