All We Imagine as Light’s beautiful loneliness will speak to your soul

It must feel especially cruel to be lonely in Mumbai. It’s true of every metropolis, every place with a 24/7 clang that we’re told leaves no room for quiet and disconnection. To be lonely there is to be plagued by silence in a storm, and anyone who’s experienced it will find that Payal Kapadia’s fiction debut All We Imagine as Light glows with an all-too-familiar ache. It’s a film that feels like a long exhale, the moment of unburdening after a tight embrace. It’s beautiful.

All We Imagine as Light is a portrait not only of a place, and all the social and political forces that drive it, but of the intensity of feeling it coughs up. Kapadia’s previous work, 2021’s A Night of Knowing Nothing, was a documentary about a real relationship torn apart by the caste system; in All We Imagine as Light, the first Indian film to win the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, it’s as if a hundred unknown experiences have been distilled into the characters of Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and Anu (Divya Prabha). They’re nurses and roommates, outsiders who’ve arrived in the city because, eventually, it seems as if everyone has to.

Prabha’s husband, bonded to her by an arranged marriage, left years ago for Germany. When a portentous red rice cooker arrives unannounced in the post, she crawls out of bed at night to embrace it like a lover. She’s held still by ghostly hands that stretch across the ocean, which prevents her from pursuing any kind of romance with a smitten colleague (Azees Nedumangad). Another woman at the hospital, Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), is about to be evicted from her home, all because her now-dead husband never passed on any papers with proof of residence.

“We’re the same, you and I,” Parvaty tells Prabha. “We’re better off alone.” It’s certainly the story Prabha tells the world but despite her severity – she flinches, as if in pain, when Anu tenderly sucks on her stove-scorched finger – Kusruti’s performance is deeply felt. Prabha’s yearning has its own orbit. She’s the lone woman swallowed up by the city, as it rattles away behind her, or maps out across her face in a window’s reflection.

Anu is younger and so, we presume, more liberated. She’s the dominant partner in her relationship, dragging her timid little boyfriend Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon) into secluded spaces so they can feverishly kiss. Yet he’s Muslim, and the ever-rising Islamophobia of prime minister Narendra Modi’s rule is pushing Anu towards a harsh and perhaps inevitable future in which they’re torn apart and she’s powerless to pursue her desires.

But there’s gentleness here. Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou’s rhythmic piano composition, “The Homeless Wanderer”, dances along like a stray dream; cinematographer Ranabir Das finds poetry in the imperfect, in half-obstructed shots, the viewpoint of a hidden observer. In the film’s second half, all three women depart for Parvaty’s village in Ratnagiri, and it’s here that Kapadia’s film drifts into a dream space. Freed from the city’s relentlessness, they finally have the chance to breathe and to think.

Anu discovers what appears to be her own face etched into the wall of a cave, her features expectant “as if she’s waiting for something to happen”. Prabha encounters someone who, real or not, forces her to confront what she’s always avoided. The women emerge from their experiences with an unspoken solidarity. As they discover, loneliness isn’t something to cure. Its existence is but a powerful illusion. And, together, they can clear away its spell.

Dir: Payal Kapadia. Starring: Kani Kusruti, Divya Prabha, Chhaya Kadam, Hridhu Haroon. Cert 15, 115 mins

‘All We Imagine as Light’ is in cinemas from 29 November