Polite Society director and star on using the action genre to explore the "violence" of being a teenage girl

gamesradar.com:

What do you do when you're struggling to perfect a reverse flying spin kick and your older sister is engaged to a man you don't approve of? Well, if you're schoolgirl Ria Khan (newcomer Priya Kansara) in filmmaker Nida Manzoor's peppy new actioner Polite Society, you plan an elaborate wedding heist with your two best friends. 

After dropping out of art school and falling into a depressive episode (the sort that involves eating an entire rotisserie chicken on the street), Lena Khan (The Umbrella Academy's Ritu Arya) finds her fortunes rapidly changing when wealthy bachelor Salim (Akshay Khanna) takes an interest in her. Her younger sister, aspiring stuntwoman Ria, does not approve of the match, however. She suspects something fishy is afoot – and the fact that she can't quite put her finger on what's wrong with Salim won't stop her trying to sabotage the union at any cost.

The film, which stemmed from the writer-director's relationship with her own sister, has been a labor of love for Manzoor, who wrote the first draft of the script a decade ago. "[Polite Society] was really inspired by my love of action movies, but also my desire to see myself there," she tells Total Film when we sit down with her and Kansara in a London hotel room. "I felt like I never really saw myself on screen."

She continues: "I realized early on that the action genre is such a perfect way to explore the experience of a teenage girl – your body is changing, it feels painful, you feel awkward in your body. It just seems like the perfect way to explore the violence of what it feels like to be a teenage girl through big, bombastic fight scenes."

And there are plenty of fight scenes in the film, with teenage angst manifesting as stylized hand-to-hand