‘Shadowbox’ review: Indian debut boasts ‘storytelling of economy and elegance’

Dir. Tanushree Das, Saumyananda Sahi. India/France/USA/Spain. 2025. 93mins

Maya (Tillotama Shome) is accustomed to taking the lead in her marriage to Sundar (Chandan Bisht), a former military officer who’s debilitated by extreme PTSD. Towards the recommendation of her judgmental and disapproving household, she works a number of jobs within the suburbs of Calcutta to help him, and gently coaxes him in the direction of alternatives which may swimsuit his restricted talents. However when Sundar disappears in suspicious circumstances, Maya’s resourcefulness is pushed to breaking level. The function directing debut from Tanushree Das and Saumyananda Sahi takes a delicate, low-key method to the theme of psychological sickness, advised from the purpose of a carer who has, the movie suggests, already endured greater than her fair proportion of familial dramas.

Storytelling of financial system and magnificence

Premiering in Berlin’s Views, the movie marks the primary function directing collaboration of Calcutta-born editor Tanushree Das, whose earlier credit embrace Eeb Allay Ooo!, which screened at Berlin in 2020 and received a prize on the Mumbai Worldwide Movie Competition, and cinematographer Saumyananda Sahi, who additionally labored on Eeb Allay Ooo! in addition to Shaunak Sen’s Oscar-nominated documentary All That Breathes, and who lenses right here. (Sen serves as a producer on this mission.) It’s an involving, impressively acted image which, whereas it may not have the broader influence of one thing like All We Think about As Mild, is more likely to profit from present curiosity in high quality, female-led Indian unbiased cinema.

Maya approaches every difficult day with the stoicism of a girl who’s painfully conscious that her household’s survival rests on her shoulders. Brisk, businesslike and environment friendly, she strikes at twice the pace of the boys within the family. Her teenage son Debu (Sayan Karmakar) is glued to his telephone. Sundar, sleeping off the liquor from the evening earlier than, is unimaginable to awaken. He’s nonetheless unresponsive when Maya bustles out to the primary of her jobs, delivering the ironing that she labored by way of the evening earlier than.

She dares to hope that at this time is perhaps the day that Sundar will get a job, by way of an appointment that her brother has grudgingly brokered on her behalf. However as Maya hurries between her varied workplaces – she additionally cleans a home and helps out at a grim-looking poultry enterprise – Sundar fails to make it to the interview. It’s unlikely that it might have been a lot use if he had proven up. Eyes clouded with incomprehension, phrases blurred by drink, Sundar is not the person she married (towards the desires of her unsympathetic household), and nonetheless loves. Debu’s relationship along with his father is advanced – he finds himself forged within the function of carer and defender, however squirms with adolescent embarrassment when his dad, derisively nicknamed ’Chief Minister’, makes a public spectacle of himself as soon as once more.

When Sundar vanishes throughout the evening, it isn’t lengthy earlier than the police develop into concerned – Sundar’s alcoholic ingesting buddy has been murdered and Sundar is the principle suspect. The busy sound design, hitherto cluttered with crickets, birds and the ambient sounds of town, takes on an oppressive high quality, poisoned by the bitter whispers of gossipy neighbours and Maya’s work colleagues. Her household makes no secret that they view her present plight as a vindication of their resistance to the wedding.

But Shome imbues Maya with the quiet power and willpower of somebody who has already weathered the very worst of occasions – a love marriage opposed by her household and his, her husband’s dishonourable discharge from the military, his illness and slide into alcohol abuse. What is probably most spectacular concerning the movie’s method is how little is overtly spelled out, and the way a lot we perceive about Maya’s troubled previous with out the necessity for unwieldy chunks of exposition. That is storytelling of financial system and magnificence.