#Models Wanted

A cautionary tale for the modern age, Milly Ali’s feature film #Models Wanted (2024), co-directed with John Soho, plays out as a horror-thriller rooted in the extreme danger girls and women can find themselves in when they eschew vigilance for success and fame.

Prital Patel plays Yasmin, a passionate and unruly FBI agent who is investigating a string of kidnappings that all seem to have started with a website advertising lucrative jobs for modelling. In order to expose the deep-rooted evil of this criminal underworld, she decides to go undercover and gets herself kidnapped. However, the scale of this operation is overwhelming, and she requires help from her sister Sonia (Suma Akter), who is part of a secret group of female saviours.

Ambitious to a fault, #Models Wanted offers a smorgasbord of characters, locations, gunfights, combat sequences, and subplots, so it’s not really possible to get bored. The gruesome and harrowing nature of the crimes certainly gives the film a gritty depth, and it’s emotionally impactful to witness the widespread misery caused to so many victims. Rarely, if ever, do audiences get to see such a plethora of badass women kicking ass and taking names, either, with so many of the story’s heroes being female.

Many of the sequences are slick, offering a true-crime-doc atmosphere alongside a police thriller momentum which seems to work. The performances are uneven, with a lot of the actors sticking too rigidly to the script and coming across as quite wooden, or going overdramatic and theatrical unnecessarily. That being said, Prital Patel is a very strong lead and carries the movie for the majority of the running time (which is a tad too long).

At times, the musical score works brilliantly to create tension and ramp up the horror of the visuals, yet there are a lot of scenes where it feels overbearing and doesn’t quite know when to back off and let the story make the noise.

The film’s strengths lie in the captivating and emotional themes, such as the deplorable deeds of sex traffickers or the topic of institutionalised racism; the agent is from Bangladesh and feels that victims who are people of colour don’t get the same focus as white victims. She vows to help POC. And, whilst the second half of the film feels convoluted with so many moving parts, it does create a sense of chaos and devastation that completely aligns with the film’s mission statement.

Sex trafficking movies have been done better, but this feels like a worthy effort.