The year was dominated by Pushpa 2, Kalki 2898 AD and The Greatest of All Time, besides a couple of Bollywood horror comedies (Stree 2 and Bhool Bhulaiyaa 3), but 2024 saw independent Indian cinema scale a few new highs and produce an array of gems with the power to stand the test of time. The ten best of the year’s releases (theatrical and on OTT) were:
All We Imagine as Light
A beautifully crafted film that lights up the screen in hues that linger long after one is done watching it, All We Imagine as Light is an exquisite piece of cinema that draws its strength from the inimitability of director Payal Kapadia’s gaze, which incorporates poetry, social commentary and portraiture of a city that nurtures dreams of a better life and yet suppresses the very desires that stem from the urge for individual freedom. At the film’s heart are three women, two Malayali nurses working in Mumbai (Kani Kusruti and Divya Prabha) and a hospital cook (Chhaya Kadam), a migrant from Maharashtra’s Ratnagiri district trying to save her chawl from a builder. The city gives them space and the anonymity to lead their lives the way they wish but the personal, social and economic hurdles they face never lets them find a steady foothold. The universal acclaim that All We Imagine as Light has garnered is, without an iota of doubt, fully deserved.
Where to watch: Running in select multiplexes
Vaazhai
The semi-autobiographical film, written, directed and co-produced by Mari Selvaraj, is marked by phenomenal craftsmanship. Behind the artful perfection is a heart and a voice that communicate with as much force as precision. The Tamil socio-political drama views rural poverty and exploitation through the innocent eyes of an aggrieved boy. Set in the late 1990s in a landscape of exceptional natural beauty, Vaazhai plays out in a deprived community whose principal occupation is harvesting raw bananas and loading them on to transport trucks. The hardy people of this southern Tamil Nadu village are at the mercy of brokers and traders. The film reiterates the concerns articulated in Selvaraj’s first two films, Pariyerum Perumal and Karnan, but it has a distinct texture and tone that instantly draw the audience in irrespective of how unacquainted they might be with this world.
Where to watch: Disney+Hotstar
Maharaja
The odd one out on this ‘best of the year’ list by virtue of being a high-grossing genre movie, writer-director Nithilan Saminathan’s sophomore venture, Maharaja, is a sharply written and executed action thriller brimming with twists and turns that straddle space and time in startling ways. No Indian film in 2024 kept the audience guessing the way Maharaja did from beginning to end. Playing out in two time-zones 15 years apart – 2009 and the present – the double-vengeance drama pits Vijay Sethupathi’s titular unassuming barber against Anurag Kashyap’s hardened criminal whose paths cross quite by chance in a nondescript hair-cutting salon. Peopled by corrupt cops, a police informer, smarmy gangsters, families caught unawares and a propitious dustbin, Maharaja weaves a complex chain of events, both intended and accidental, into a strikingly coherent, consistently gripping story of individuals grappling with unsettling happenstance. It is all held together magnificently by a superlative pivotal performance from Vijay Sethupathi.
Where to watch: Netflix
Ullozhukku
National Award-winning filmmaker Christo Tomy’s narrative feature debut, Ullozhukku (Undercurrent), is a terrific delineation of a fraught relationship between a woman (Urvashi) and her daughter-in-law (Parvathy Thiruvoth) set against the background of a flood-affected area of Kerala’s Alappuzha. The Malayalam film is centred on the two women’s conflicting responses to a man on his deathbed, an extramarital affair, a pregnancy and a funeral. The gender dynamic in Ullozhukku is marvellously nuanced and quietly intense as the two women from two different generations navigate the elements that make up the environment they inhabit and the notions of morality that society prescribes for them. The subtlety of the social and personal drama is brought out with great skill by the director. With two actors perfectly in synch with the demands of the plot, the film thrives on the authenticity of the landscape and the delicate emotions it broaches.
Where to watch: Amazon Prime Video
Manikbabur Megh
Debutant director Abhinandan Banerjee’s Manikbabur Megh (The Cloud and the Man) is a linear narrative that steadfastly eschews wordiness and melodrama. But that isn’t the only reason why it is that rare contemporary Bengali film that dares to strike out in a new direction. Manikbabur Megh, driven by a unique and highly original vision, is anchored by a brilliantly muted performance from Chandan Sen. It employs evocative means to blend gentle flights of surrealism with a deep awareness of the harsh realities of a big city, especially for those that are condemned to languish on its margins or thereabouts, in dispiriting loneliness. The wonderfully well composed essay hinges on a middle-aged schoolteacher trapped in a limbo that makes him incapable of connecting with people around him. With the lead actor masterfully intertwining physical gestures with facial expressions, the film dissects the correlation between urban angst and the emotional vacuums it engenders.
Where to watch: Theatrically released, not available for streaming yet
Girls Will Be Girls
Debutante Shuchi Talati’s Girls Will Be Girls is a consummately constructed coming-of-age story set in a co-educational boarding school in the foothills of the Himalayas. It blends subtle suggestion of tensions between a mother and a daughter and overt yet tentative assertions of tremulous teen sexuality to piece together an unfailingly convincing portrait of a girl who traverses an arc of discovery that brings her face to face with dimensions of her physical, emotional and psychological needs. With a mellow lead performance from debutante Preeti Panigrahi supported by a memorable, emotionally complex turn by Kani Kusruti as the mother, Girls Will Be Girls, which dropped on a streamer late in the year after winning a couple of awards in Sundance in early 2024, deservedly shot to the top of the list of the most sublime young adult dramas ever made in India.
Where to watch: Amazon Prime Video
I Want to Talk
Director Shoojit Sircar has a way of squeezing relatable drama out of the minutiae of human life and death. In I Want to Talk, he does just that while dealing with the spectre of mortality and things that it makes the living do. Abhishek Bachchan is a career-best performance as a brash, successful California-based adman laid low by laryngeal cancer, brings to life a battle for survival inspired by a real-life survivor. I Want to Talk evokes the tics of dramas about terminally ill patients but goes beyond the genre’s confines to deliver a profoundly moving tale examining the spirit of a man who is told that his days are numbered and who goes under the knife innumerable times. The film touches an instant chord because it is achingly life-affirming. The protagonist, adopting the stance of a fighter, stares down death. I Want to Talk speaks to the innate human urge to conquer the inevitability of transience.
Where to watch: Screened in multiplexes. OTT release awaited
Kottukkaali
P.S. Vinothraj (Rotterdam Tiger Prize winner Koozhangal, 2021) returned in 2024 with a film that is nearly as effective as his unforgettable debut. Kottukkaali (The Adamant Girl), which premiered in the Forum section of the Berlin Film Festival, probes the consequences of patriarchy and superstition on a village girl determined not to kowtow to norms laid down by society. Vinothraj seamlessly merges the absurdist and the naturalistic, helped along by actors who inform their performances with piercing honesty and commitment. The adamant girl of the title (Anna Ben) is believed to be under an evil spell because she stalls the desire of her maternal uncle (Soori) to marry her. The family sets out on a journey to meet a seer who they believe can exorcise the spirit that has possessed the girl. Kottukkaali is a road movie of sorts that makes its way through a maze of mishaps and revelations. It is intriguing and illuminating in equal parts, a genuine cinematic triumph.
Where to watch: Amazon Prime Video
Meiyazhagan
A bewitching drama centred on two grown-up men negotiating a connection that one of them makes instinctively and the other struggles to fathom, Meiyazhagan, written and directed by C. Prem Kumar, is unusual in more ways than one. The Tamil film enters delicate territory where human emotions swivel around memories of time gone by and look for relevance more than two decades later. Buoyed by two outstanding performances from Karthi and Arvind Swamy, Meiyazhagan – the title comes from the name of one of the two principal characters but it isn’t verbalised until very last scene – is a celebration of the little joys of life and the centrality of one’s roots in the development of what one holds dear or discards in the inexorable journey of life. In an era of hyper-masculine action films that projects men as vengeance-seeking agents of wrath, Meiyazhagan is a whiff of fresh air, a film that is akin to a warm snuggle on a winter night.
Where to watch: Netflix
Fairy Folk
Low-budget, improvisational filmmaking at its most adventurous (and deliciously unhinged), Karan Gour’s Fairy Folk is an exploration of modern-day urban relationships couched in magic-realist fantasy. The film wears its independence on its sleeves and frees the leads, real-life couple Rasika Dugal and Mukul Chadda, to foray into uncharted zones as actors. Situating the man-woman relationship within a disintegrating marriage, the script, written by the director himself, flies in surprising directions with a suppleness that would be difficult to replicate in cinema that plays by the rules. The plot hinges on a couple who runs into a ‘creature’ on a secluded road in Mumbai (a deserted space in a bustling megalopolis is no less a rarity than the disorienting experiences that lie in wait for the duo). The unmoving, genderless being puts the couple’s already strained relationship to the test and lends the film its remarkable uniqueness. Fairy Folk did not get the audience it deserved and that was the latter’s loss.
Where to watch: Theatrically release, not streaming yet
