Its refusal of melodramatic resolution and its reliance on pauses, silences, and open endings create a cinematic language that privileges ambiguity over closure and subjective perception over any claim to certainty.
Published Sep 30, 2025 | 11:54 AM ⚊ Updated Sep 30, 2025 | 11:54 AM
Poster of If on a Winter's Night.
Synopsis: The precarity of migrant life, the difficulty of securing a home in a city where the powerful constantly override the powerless, and the daily negotiations between dreams and survival emerge as the central themes of If on a Winter’s Night. The narrative arc follows a young couple from Kerala through the mundane difficulties of urban life in Delhi.
Sanju Surendran’s film If on a Winter’s Night (Khidki Gaav) belongs to a lineage of off-beat Indian cinema that turns its gaze away from spectacular narratives and toward the fragile intimacies of everyday life, especially as lived by migrants and the precarious classes in the city.
From Sai Paranjpye’s Disha (1990), which portrayed the alienation of rural workers in Bombay, to Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay! (1988), which chronicled the survival strategies of street children, to Rituparno Ghosh’s Utsab (2000) and Anand Patwardhan’s documentary Bombay: Our City (1985), the urban has often appeared not as a space of opportunity but as a site of dispossession, estrangement, and unequal belonging.
More recent independent films, Rajesh Shera’s The Flute (2007), Sanal Kumar Sasidharan’s Oraalppokkam (2014), and Devashish Makhija’s Ajji (2017), have similarly articulated how migration, poverty, and fragile forms of shelter shape both identity and intimacy in contemporary India. If on a Winter’s Night extends this trajectory by focusing on the lower-middle-class migrant couple from Kerala who attempt to build a life in Delhi.
Rather than treating the city as a backdrop, If on a Winter’s Night renders the metropolis as an active force that destabilises love, corrodes the idea of home, and reveals the persistent condition of precarity under neoliberal urbanism.
If on a Winter’s Night arrives with a title that inevitably recalls Italo Calvino’s celebrated novel If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, but the connection is merely nominal. There is no direct or indirect adaptation of Calvino’s metafiction here; the phrase works more as a poetic evocation of estrangement, disquiet, and uncertainty than as a narrative intertext.
The “winter’s night” becomes a metaphor for precarity, for being thrown into conditions of instability where love, survival, and belonging must be constantly negotiated. The film is rooted in the story of Sarah (Bhanu Priyamvada), an aspiring researcher and Abhi (Roshan Abdul Rahoof), an aspiring artist, the young couple from Kerala living together in Delhi, and it carefully charts the vulnerabilities of their life as lower-middle-class migrants struggling to build a future in an indifferent city.
Sarah has a modest job that barely sustains them and is burdened with the responsibility of supporting her family back home in Kerala. Abhi, an unsettled artist, contributes little to their immediate survival, though he carries his own aspirations. Their finances are in tatters, and the fragility of their existence constantly intrudes on their relationship.
The narrative arc follows them through the mundane difficulties of urban life until a crisis erupts when the landlord dies and the family reclaims their rented floor for funeral rites. The couple is evicted at night, thrown into the street with no safety or money. Eventually, friends take them in, and they manage to secure a new place. But the final image of the film, an ominous knock on the door of their new apartment, reminds the audience that their insecurity is far from resolved.
The precarity of migrant life, the difficulty of securing a home in a city where the powerful constantly override the powerless, and the daily negotiations between dreams and survival emerge as the film’s central themes. Home is never a refuge here, only a fragile arrangement vulnerable to eviction, intrusion, or sudden collapse.
The unfamiliarity of the city and language deepens their struggle, shaping not only how they navigate daily life but also how they experience belonging and exclusion. South Indian migrants in cities like Delhi and Mumbai often live in a state of double displacement, navigating linguistic and cultural estrangement on the one hand, and the relentless economic insecurities of urban life on the other. Their identities are shaped as much by distance from home as by the perilous belonging they negotiate in the metropolis.
As Malayali migrants in Delhi, Abhi and Sarah are always negotiating marginality: The language is not theirs, the social codes feel alien, and their existence is constantly under scrutiny. Sarah is caught in multiple binds, anchored to her job, tethered by obligations to her family in Kerala, and emotionally tied to Abhi, whose artistic calling leaves him unmoored in practical terms.
The film conveys how such burdens weigh upon love, transforming care into labour and intimacy into negotiation. Their relationship remains beautiful, tender, and sincere, but it is never free of the external pressures that surround it.
The film refuses melodrama, opting instead for an accumulation of small erosions. Financial insecurity, unpaid bills, family phone calls, frayed tempers, and tender reconciliations build a rhythm that feels authentic to the migrant experience. Love in this world is not destroyed by betrayal or conflict but by the attrition of economics and the uncertainty of housing.
Yet within this bleakness, Surendran preserves moments of resilience: The couple singing together in Malayalam, sharing laughter in cramped quarters, finding solace in each other even when the world is hostile. These are not romanticised gestures but acts of survival, small resistances against disintegration.
The performances are finely tuned to the film’s ethos. Roshan Abdool Rahoof’s Abhi embodies a quiet, unassuming presence, innocent and occasionally flippant, but never passive. He holds on to dreams even as he leans on Sarah’s pragmatism. Bhanu Priyamvada’s Sarah, however, is the emotional centre of the film. She carries the weight of obligations with weary determination, embodying care, restraint, and exhaustion all at once.
Their chemistry is understated, built not on dramatic declarations but on the rhythms of everyday intimacy. The screenplay by Rekha Raj is remarkably natural and unforced; it avoids the traps of over-explanation or contrived melodrama.
Abhi’s backstory is only faintly sketched, but the film hints that he comes from a comparatively happier and more caring family than Sarah, recalling the famous opening of Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Sarah’s family pressures are conveyed without overstatement, and much of the drama emerges from silence, pauses, and ambiguous gestures.
The writing is marked by restraint, allowing Surendran’s direction and the actors’ performances to flesh out emotional reality without didacticism.
Visually, the film adheres to an austere, realist aesthetic. The camera lingers on textures of walls, light falling on tired faces, and the suffocating intimacy of small rented spaces. Sound design avoids manipulative background music; instead, ambient noises and silence dominate.
The cinematography, by Manesh Madhavan, is tender even within this realism, allowing occasional moments of softness to break through the hardness of everyday struggle. The pacing is deliberate, sometimes slow, but it matches the rhythms of precarity itself, where crises are drawn out and uncertainties drag on.
While If on a Winter’s Night succeeds in capturing the emotional fragility and economic vulnerability of migrant life in Delhi, it largely sidesteps the micro-politics of urbanism that structure this precarity. By narrowing its focus to the intimate world of Abhi and Sarah, the film achieves emotional resonance but loses an opportunity to situate their struggles within the broader, more granular textures of migrant urbanism — where survival depends not just on resilience in love but also on constant tactical negotiations with the city’s hidden hierarchies. This omission does not weaken the film’s power, but it does mark a limit to its social imagination.
Nevertheless, there are several strengths to If on a Winter’s Night. It captures with painful clarity the lived reality of young migrants in India’s metropolises, showing how dreams are whittled down by survival, and how love is constantly tested not by betrayal but by the neoliberal political economy.
It showcases two deeply committed performances, trusts its audience with ambiguity, and speaks to social realities often ignored in mainstream cinema. It deservedly won the Hylife Vision Award at the Busan International Film Festival in 2025, a recognition of its quiet but forceful impact.
The film’s weaknesses are intertwined with its strengths. Its deliberate pace and refusal to provide narrative resolution may frustrate some, and Abhi’s artistic identity remains somewhat underdeveloped. The ambiguity that gives the film depth also leaves occasional gaps, but these are minor compared to the larger achievement.
Ultimately, the film is not about dramatic transformation but about endurance. It tells the story of a couple whose love is sustained, even enriched, by tenderness, but is constantly corroded by precarity. The title’s Calvino echo, far from being misleading, becomes a poetic frame: This is their “winter’s night,” their season of fragility and estrangement.
The final knock on the door leaves the audience with a lingering ache, reminding us that for the precarious, security is always provisional. What Sanju Surendran and Rekha Raj deliver here is a deeply felt portrait of young people from lower-middle-class backgrounds trying to make a life in an unforgiving city. It is a film that refuses spectacle but insists on truth, and it leaves its viewers unsettled, thoughtful, and quietly moved.
It is a film that refuses spectacle but insists on fragments of lived experience, leaving its viewers unsettled, thoughtful, and quietly moved. Rather than offering the comfort of a complete or seamless narrative, If on a Winter’s Night dwells in contingency, incompleteness, and the provisionality of meaning.
Its refusal of melodramatic resolution and its reliance on pauses, silences, and open endings create a cinematic language that privileges ambiguity over closure and subjective perception over any claim to certainty. The city is not shown as a transparent backdrop but as an unstable and shifting terrain, where migrants are both present and marginal, visible and invisible.
The unsettling final knock on the door exemplifies this sensibility; it withholds explanation, leaving the audience to confront the instability of interpretation just as the characters confront the instability of life. In doing so, the film suggests that contemporary cinema can approach migrant lives not through definitive statements but through evocations of uncertainty and fragility, capturing the shifting conditions that subjects inhabit and the tenuous negotiations that shape their everyday existence.
Love, in its most fragile form, cannot endure in isolation; it thrives only when nourished by a web of support systems that stabilise and protect it. When such scaffolding, social acceptance, financial security, familial networks, the assurance of home, and a sense of belonging in one’s environment are absent, love is forced to bear the impossible weight of survival on its own.
In such circumstances, what begins as tenderness and mutual care is easily corroded by fear, the exhaustion of relentless struggle, the alienation of inhabiting spaces that remain hostile, and the helplessness of not knowing what tomorrow will bring.
The lovers’ affection may be genuine and intense, yet without those external reinforcements, it becomes fragile, always vulnerable to disintegration. What makes love radiant, the shared dream of continuity, requires not just emotion but the material and social infrastructures that allow intimacy to flourish without being suffocated by anxiety.
Where those infrastructures collapse, as the film shows, love itself is forced into the precarious condition of mere endurance, constantly shadowed by the threat of loss.
(Views are personal. Edited by Muhammed Fazil.)
