BHANU PRIYAMVADA AND ROSHAN ABDUL RAHOOF IN IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT

SANJU SURENDRAN: IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT (2025) - NEW DIRECTORS/NEW FILMS 2026

Poverty and displacement in modern India

If on a Winter's Night is, Indian festival programmer and critic Aditya Shrikrishna says on Letterboxd, a "wondrous" work, "a cinema of displacement, of a certain weariness creeping into love, affection, empathy and all the good things due to the loss of a home and the inability to find a new one (physical and metaphorical), the inability to find reinforcing companionship and the precarious nature of a life without privilege." He sums up very well the feelings and implications of this film if not quite the intricacies of its plot. Vadim Rizov says, also on Letterboxd: "As an economic vise tightens around the couple, the film made me cover my eyes in horror—'underpaid creative class' is something I know all about. There’s a current surplus of movies-about-making-movies, but few about the laborers keeping the festival economy moving which showcases all of these, and I suspect that’s part of why the movie got to me." Two glimpses at the wide-ranging appeal of this vivid, sad film.

The young couple at the center of the story is so beautiful and sweet, and yet so doomed. They have come from southern Malayalam-speaking Kerala to live in the big, cold, far-off northern Indian capital city of Delhi, where people speak Hindi, "far away from home" Shrikrishna writes "and grappling with a foreign people and foreign language in one's own country." Their world is sliding away under their feet. Every minute someone is asking them for money, landlord, relatives, beggar children on the street, and they are asking each other for it and their insecurity,suspicion and need are undermining their relationship by the hour.

What a beautiful man is Sarah's ostensible boyfriend Abhi (Roshan Abdul Rahoof, who may be some sort of heartthrob, since he has 147,000 fans on Facebook), but how useless. He wants to be an artist and does pencil sketches of people on the street, but drifts into playing with a street band. As for Sarah (Bhanu Priyamvada), also young and attractive, she has a small gig that she loves but pays poorly - a "thankless" job as seasonal support staff at an international film festival - but her aspiration is to be a "researcher." With this insufficient salary she must support herself and Abhi, but she also gets constant calls to send money from her mother in Kerala. They have come to Delhi not only to pursue their futures but to escape from their cloying families. With modern communications, such escape is hard to achieve.

After a while this tale of devolution, poverty and decreasing prospects begins to seem over-deterministic, but such a story must be like that to serve its Darwinian, Dickensian purpose. What may seem preposterous, and in terms of human rights and the American Constitution certainly is, is that after things are already going very badly, the couple returns to their small house one day to find they have been literally thrown out of it by a noisy crowd of mourners of a recently dead man who originally lived here. "It is our custom," a woman tells them. And they cannot even gather up their valuables which are thrown together in a corner and must wait a day or two to collect them.

Out they go wandering nowhere, making feeble phone calls to people who all say they're not in town, though they should be suspicious because we know how their friend Simon has used his cell phone to lie about having a house and then, when someone comes to Delhi, lying that he's away. (Simon eventually had to admit to Sarah and Abhi that he was homeless and they took him in.) Wandering in the winter cold, the couple gets caught in a winter rainstorm, for it is Christmastime (Sarah is Christian, and so an outsider in yet another way).

Now they begin to be no longer so much like whingeing, manipulative Indians but wailing Italians, à la Rossellini-De sica, seated wet, shivering and pathetic at a long sad bus stop with a big billboard behind them about living a happy life. They are rescued through somebody Abhi knows. The two man who get out of the car to help are wearing overcoats: since Abhi has been surviving on layered T shirts, now we see better how helpless they are.

In a sequel, we see Abhi and Sarah, whose alienation from each other was healed by their shared misery, moving into a nice new little house together. But then a sequel to the sequel brings a hard, threatening knocking on their door: they've been saved, but they're still going down.

I thought of Payal Kapadia's All We Imagine As Light (Kapadia produced this film) and how that seemed like just a soap opera at first, till it emerged how good the actors were and what depth and sweep the film had. But this one is different. It couldn't be a soap opera because it's too narrow and specific, and it moves rather swiftly, though Aditya Shitkrisna says it "unravels slowly," but acknowledges it does so in "short, breathable scenes." However you analyze the film, it's very much like a short story and not a novel, but it is pungent. It's just a little hard to connect with a tale that seems so predictable, so deterministic. We have to focus on its effort to depict a plight in India both universal and contemporary: migrants from the south to the north, from a simpler, easier world, the world of Apu, to a harder, northern, urban one, a town without pity.

Kapadia's All We Imagine As Light, India's first Cannes Competition film in thirty years, was covered here as part of the 2024 New York Film Festival. Its Metacritic rating is 93%.

If on a Winter's Night/Khidki Gaav, 100 mins., in Malayalam and Hindi, premiered at Busan Sept. 20, 2025. It was screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films 2026. Showtimes:
Tue, April 14 Walter Reade Theater
6:00 PM
Wed, April 15 MoMA
9:00 PM

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.