At the memorial gathering for her husband Adnan, 30-year-old Nawal (a riveting Mouna Hawa) is offered many empty words of support and so-called comfort by friends and family. “When a woman loses her husband, she loses her lover, her partner, everything in her life,” clucks a commiserating neighbor. What she fails to mention is how much is not lost, but can, under the Jordanian legal system so scathingly exposed in Amjad Al Rasheed‘s fluid, gripping “Inshallah a Boy,” be taken. Employment, home, child, dignity – all can be summarily stripped from a widow who has committed the grievous crime of never having borne a son. 

Al Rasheed’s precision-tooled movie is a social-realist drama rendered as an escape thriller where the labyrinth that Nawal must navigate is the Jordanian social order itself, a massive bureaucratic, patriarchal maze designed to ensure that any woman trying to evade its clutches will batter herself to exhaustion sooner or later against one of its deviously placed dead ends. But Nawal, though initially timid and thrown into a tailspin of shock and grief by Adnan’s premature demise, is not the type to be easily bullied out of the few things she knows are hers by right: her small, mouse-infested Amman apartment, custody of her daughter Nora (Seleena Rababah) and a pickup truck that Nawal cannot drive but, for reasons perhaps even she does not understand, stubbornly refuses to sell. 

When it transpires that there are four outstanding truck payments still due to her brother-in-law Rifqi (Haitham Omari), she initially assumes Rifqi will grant her a grace period. Nawal’s job, working as an in-home nurse for the elderly matriarch of a rich family, does not pay handsomely, and keeping it requires bending the rules of her three-month mourning period, but she will get by, with time. But Rifqi is impatient for the truck money, and when it’s discovered that Adnan never signed the papers that would have made Nawal the inheritor of the apartment her dowry and salary at least partially paid for, Rifqi comes for that too. In fact, he is self-righteously incensed by her refusal to simply let him take control of all of her assets, including her child. Who is she to deny him and Adnan’s other relatives their legally mandated share of these meager spoils? In desperation, Nawal does the only thing she can think of to stay the judge’s order: she claims to be pregnant. 

As soon as that die is cast, the ticking-clock mechanism of Al Rasheed, Rula Nasser and Delphine Agut’s cleverly escalating screenplay goes into overdrive. In DP Kanamé Onoyama’s elegant but increasingly close-up, urgent imagery, Nawal begs her wealthy employer’s comparatively liberated, sexually frank daughter Lauren (a smoldering Yumna Marwan) who is unhappily pregnant with her unfaithful husband’s child, to take a pregnancy test in her name. In return, Nawal agrees to help Lauren get an abortion despite her religious scruples (the exchange where the women barter the relative gravity of the sins they’re about to commit is a standout), which leads to spiraling consequences of its own. 

If there is slight narrative convenience in Lauren’s unwanted pregnancy coinciding so neatly with Nawal needing a positive test, that storyline takes such a bitterly ironic turn afterwards that it doesn’t feel contrived. Indeed, “Inshallah a Boy” moves like a sleek thriller, but is full of the unsolved mysteries and dangling question marks of real life: the locked phone for which Nawal cannot guess the password; the condoms she finds in Adnan’s jacket; Adnan’s layoff, which she had never known about; the malicious or maybe simply careless reason he never signed the damn form in the first place.

It’s refreshing that Nawal is not played as a saint or a martyr and makes as many wrong decision as right ones — always the way when you’re forced into a no-win situation. Everyone is waiting for her foot to slip, and when it does, in the shape of a ride she accepts from her smitten co-worker Hassan (Eslam Al-Awadi), even her sympathetic brother Ahmad (Mohammed Al Jizawi), increasingly crumpled and bloodshot as the feud takes its toll, starts to turn on her.

Left entirely alone, Nawal needs a miracle. But whether or not she gets one, there is still incalculable damage done, not just to the individual but to society, when principled, intelligent women like her must expend so much energy battling for a quarter of the basic human rights their male counterparts take as their social due. With the selection of “Inshallah a Boy” as Jordan’s International Oscar entry, perhaps there is hope that Al Rasheed’s exciting, galvanizing drama can become a focal point for a call for reform not just in Jordan, but in any society that refuses to recognize the inherent value — to the state, to the economy, to the family and to the culture —  of, inshallah, a girl.