Bassam Tariq brings naturalistic performances into stories that can turn strange. We rate his attention to family and cultural detail, though Bait suggests he is most persuasive when the production stops announcing how unusual it all is.
Fi1m perspective
In Bait (2026), an actor is trying to win a job and please far too many people. Bassam Tariq shares directing duties with Tom George, letting comedy share space with psychological thriller. We felt for Shah most in the family scenes, where his efforts to please people made the strain painfully recognisable. Those scenes give us a reason to care about the man beyond the question of whether he gets the job.
He began in documentary, co-directing These Birds Walk (2013), about runaway children in Karachi, with Omar Mullick. The short Ghosts of Sugar Land (2019) followed, before his fiction feature debut, Mogul Mowgli (2020), co-written with Riz Ahmed. Its British-Pakistani rapper belongs to a body of work repeatedly concerned with Muslim and South Asian lives, family ties and cultural inheritance. Naturalistic performances share space with heightened reverie in Mogul Mowgli, so the shifts in Bait have a clear precedent. Close collaboration with actors on writing and performance is central to Tariq's method.
In Bait, cinematographers Frank Lamm and Dan Atherton and production designer Steve Summersgill give the changes of genre a polish that suits a story about an actor under scrutiny. The movement between comedy and thriller mostly works, keeping the series from repeating the same anxious beat. But the distress sometimes looks too tidily presented, and we become aware of the production when we should be worrying about Shah. We prefer the family scenes, which have less need to announce their strangeness.
Some of Bait's supporting characters deserve more attention, and that is a meaningful limitation in work so concerned with family and community. There is enough warmth and humour here to make us want Tariq to stay with those people for longer. Start with Bait; it is a funny, uneasy introduction, provided a few overworked passages do not put you off.
Biography
Bassam Tariq is a Pakistani-born American film director, producer and screenwriter. He was born on 22 October 1986 in Karachi, Pakistan.
Tariq co-directed and produced the documentary These Birds Walk (2013) with Omar Mullick. He was named in Filmmaker magazine's "25 New Faces of Independent Film" in 2012 and is a TED Fellow. He co-founded a halal butcher shop in New York City.
His feature directorial debut Mogul Mowgli (2020), which he co-wrote, starred Riz Ahmed and received a BAFTA nomination for Outstanding British Film. He directed the documentary short Ghosts of Sugar Land (2019) and three episodes of the series Bait (2026). He is also attached to the feature Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother (2026).
