Film as a medium often shines best when introducing its audience to worlds unfamiliar to their own. Many in the West are unlikely to be familiar with the 1969 Hindi musical Ardhana, an intense intergenerational family drama. Fawzia Mizra’s 2023 film The Queen of My Dreams leans heavily on Ardhana, including clips from the classic film in its own narrative while adapting many of its themes. Its title is also the English translation of Ardhana’s most popular song “Mere Sapno Ki Rana.”

Azra (Amrit Kaur) is a grad student studying acting in Toronto in 1999. A closeted lesbian living with her “roommate,” Azra butts heads with her mother Miriam (Nimra Bucha) over her career arc and lack of desire to adhere to the strict expectation of a first-generation Muslim immigrant. The sudden death of her father Hassan (Hamza Haq) on a trip back home to Pakistan takes Azra out of her world, forcing a reexamination of her relationship with her mother, and her culture.

Flashbacks play a sizable role in Mizra’s feature. In a nod to Bollywood casting traditions, Kaur performs double duty as Miriam in the 1969 flashbacks, showcasing a colorful, inviting world that’s a lot of fun to spend time in. Though the first act spends much of its time building up Azra as the protagonist, Queen of My Dreams is really Miriam’s story, increasingly ceding ground to the flashbacks as the narrative rolls along. After finishing med school in Europe, Hassan finds work in Canada, drawing only daughter Miriam away from home, deceiving her own mother in the process, setting up some intergenerational strife that’s eerily similar to Miriam’s own struggles with her daughter.

Mizra delivers a touching commentary on the cyclical pattern of daughters antagonizing and emulating their mothers. The theme of defying expectations transcends culture, religion, and sexuality. Queen of My Dreams is very confident in its own world, delivering a welcoming portrayal of Pakistan for audience members who might be unfamiliar with the region.

The film loses a bit of its power in the third act. Mizra doesn’t have a great handle on the balance between the flashbacks and the film’s present-day narrative in 1999, exacerbated by an unnecessary pitstop in 1989 Nova Scotia, where Miriam and Hassan first settled. There’s little rhyme or reason to how the flashbacks come and go, Mizra’s fascination with revisiting Ardhana growing tedious in the absence of plot progression.

Queen of My Dreams often severely underdelivers on its LGBTQ themes. Azra’s girlfriend Rachel (Kya Mosey) is a nonentity for the bulk of the film, Mizra unwilling to force any lesbian awakening on her characters. Real life doesn’t often come with easy answers to the struggles that some families feel toward homosexuality, but this film doesn’t really try to confront any of this either.

The narrative is too often bailed out by the film’s gorgeous aesthetics. Inexplicably, the whole experience feels like it’s overstayed its welcome despite a brisk 96-minute runtime. There is a beautiful film to be found in Mizra’s work, but it’s hard to praise her technical skills as a director when her narrative so blatantly holds back from its audience.