The Comfort of Illusion

Davtyan Mariam
November 16, 2025
ELTE Film

Escapism has always been one of the most common coping mechanisms when reality is too difficult to face. But how far can we go in our attempt to escape? Make It Look Real by Danial Shah is a Pakistani–Belgian film portraying a photo studio in Pakistan where people have their pictures edited. In the film, the photo studio serves as a small sanctuary for people’s hidden desires – some ask to include women in their photos, others a beautiful landscape, but the most common request is to add guns, often more than one. Reshaping their appearance, and symbolically their reality, becomes the central focus of the film, showing how people use illusion as a form of comfort and control.

Visually, the photo studio where Sakhi works is a calm, almost meditative place, where people’s thoughts can easily turn into relatively real pictures – they can see them and even place them in their homes. With enough dedication and belief, these images can feel real not only to them but also to others who see the photos. Shah quietly observes each client and the process of choosing the content of the photo – there is no explanation or narration, simply letting the camera watch. Everyone is deeply focused and engaged in the process of transformation. We are left alone with Sakhi, concentrated on clicking the mouse, giving patient instructions, while the curious clients enthusiastically wait for the result. The edits are certainly artificial, while the emotions behind them are real, and that’s where we begin to question people’s decisions.

“Make it look real” – we hear this sentence from the photo studio visitors many times during the film. Why do people want to “make it look real” when it’s clearly fake? In the film, this repeated phrase becomes a clear confession of wanting a change and a desire to be seen differently. Perhaps, it is one of the few ways they have discovered to gain control over the situation they can’t change, to seem more powerful when they are struggling inside with fears, or even to find comfort in those pictures and the photo studio that becomes a small sanctuary of a psychologically safe space - something that the real world often refuses to offer them.

In our interview for the Verzió Film Festival, Danial Shah mentioned that “the goal was not to leave the studio.” This deliberate choice of the photo studio setting directly connects to the idea that the studio is a small world where fantasy and reality exist side by side. By keeping the whole story within this confined space, Shah shows that for most visitors, the studio is not only a physical location but also a portal to escape reality while paradoxically confronting it face to face. In her article “Considering Human Rights Films, Representation, and Ethics: Whose Face?” (2012), Sonia Tascon explains that documentary filmmakers always face questions about who controls the image and who is represented. In Make It Look Real, Shah changes this perspective: the visitors of the photo studio decide how they want to appear, both in the film and the photos. By choosing how they are shown, they are not just controlling our perception of them - they are creating an illusion of themselves that may be closer to how they wish to feel or be seen.

What makes Make It Look Real so surreal is the blurred line between illusion and truth, between good and bad, between kindness and aggression. It suggests that both dimensions coexist, that illusion is not the opposite of reality but a necessary extension of it. The film’s observational style invites the viewer to experience the comfort these people find in their fantasies rather than to judge them. We, as viewers, have the right to decide ourselves whether we see aggression in their behavior or recognize their actions as necessary to remain sane within the reality they face every day. The director’s refusal to moralize is essential here, as it keeps these illusions fragile yet undamaged and complete.

In the end, the comfort of illusion is what remains after watching the film, as it is a clear act of survival for those who have nowhere else to escape. For the visitors of the studio, the edited pictures function as a place to open up and share, even if only visually and in a limited way. Make It Look Real shows us that illusion is not always the opposite of truth. To be seen, to have a space to confess you want something you can’t have, to believe - even for a moment, that you are powerful while clearly vulnerable, may perhaps be another way to show the reality too. 

 

References

Shah, D. (2025, November). Interview for Verzió Film Festival ['Everything is designed except your face' | Make It Look Real]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DStgTGsxHfM&t=3s

Tascon, S. (2012). Considering Human Rights Films, Representation, and Ethics: Whose Face? Human Rights Quarterly, 34(4), 864–883.

 

The article was created as part of the UniVerzió program, in collaboration between the Verzió Film Festival and the Department of Film Studies at Eötvös Loránd University. Instructor: Beja Margitházi.