All We Imagine as Light Review: Poetic & Profound

The narrative unfolds in the humid, unglamorous corridors of a Mumbai hospital, where Nurse Prabha (Kani Kusruti) goes through her days with the mechanical precision of someone who has long since stopped questioning her life. Her routine-administering injections, soothing anxious patients, returning to a cramped flat-is shattered when she receives an unexpected gift from her estranged husband: a rice cooker. The appliance, absurdly mundane, becomes a symbol of a marriage that exists only in fragments, a gesture that reopens old wounds.

Meanwhile, her younger roommate Anu (Divya Prabha) is caught in a different kind of stalemate. She is desperate to find a secluded spot in Mumbai to be intimate with her boyfriend Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon), but the city offers no privacy-not in crowded buses, not in locked cars, not even in the shadow of a half-built flyover. Their fumbled attempts are laced with comic desperation, but also a raw ache for connection.

The third thread belongs to Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), an older nurse facing eviction from her home, her roots in the city being washed away by redevelopment. When the three women embark on a trip to a beach town, the film’s pace shifts. The ocean, the open sky, the salt-caked air-these elements become more than scenery. They are the space where suppressed desires finally breathe, where Prabha confronts the ghost of her marriage, and Anu finds an island (literally) for her love.

Kapadia resists neat resolutions. The film ends not with a climax, but with a release-a slow exhale after years of holding breath.

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It’s tempting to call All We Imagine as Light a “slow burn,” but that phrase undersells the controlled precision of Kapadia’s craft. This is a film that trusts its audience to read between frames, to feel the weight of a lingering shot on a hospital corridor, to decode the ache in Kusruti’s downcast eyes. The director, who broke through with the documentary A Night of Knowing Nothing, brings that ethnographic eye to fiction: Mumbai is not a backdrop but a character-cramped, relentless, yet occasionally generous.

Kani Kusruti delivers the performance of her career. As Prabha, she radiates a stoic melancholy that never tips into self-pity. Watch the scene where she stares at the rice cooker, unboxing it as if it were a bomb. Her face registers a dozen emotions-confusion, anger, a flicker of hope-before settling into a weary resignation. It’s acting of the highest order: minimalist, truthful, devastating.

Divya Prabha’s Anu provides the counterweight. She is younger, brasher, burning with impatience. Her romance with Shiaz is captured in stolen glances and aborted kisses-Kapadia understands that desire is often most potent in its denial. The film’s most electrifying moment involves a deserted beach at night, a trembling flashlight, and the sound of waves swallowing whispers.

Chhaya Kadam’s Parvaty brings grounded wisdom, but the screenplay wisely avoids making her a saint. She is tired, angry, and stubborn-a woman who has fought for every inch of her existence. The three women together form a quiet sisterhood that asks for no permission.

Cinematographer Ranabir Das shoots Mumbai in near-documentary grain, finding beauty in peeling paint and rain-soaked tarpaulins. The beach town sequences open up into widescreen blues and golds, a visual liberation that mirrors the emotional arc. The sound design is equally deliberate: the hum of hospital machines, the honking of traffic, the abrupt silence of the sea.

If there’s a flaw, it’s in the pacing. The first hour moves with deliberate slowness that may frustrate viewers accustomed to conventional narrative propulsion. A subplot involving a drowning man feels slightly undercooked-symbolic but not fully integrated. And the film’s refusal to offer catharsis in expected ways might leave some feeling unmoored.

But Kapadia is not interested in easy resolutions. She is interested in the spaces between words, the gestures we make when language fails. All We Imagine as Light is a film about what we carry-grief, hope, rice cookers-and what it means to finally set some of it down.

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Pros

• Kani Kusruti’s performance is a masterclass in restrained emotion
• Exquisite visual storytelling-every frame feels considered, unforced
• Authentic, unsentimental portrayal of urban loneliness and female friendship
• The beach-town climax offers genuine, earned catharsis without melodrama

Cons

• Deliberate pacing will test viewers expecting conventional drama
• The drowning-man subplot feels disconnected from the main narrative
• Some may find the ending too ambiguous, lacking a clear emotional payoff
• Secondary characters (Shiaz, Dr. Manoj) remain sketchy, functional rather than fleshed out

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All We Imagine as Light is not a film you watch-it’s a film you inhabit. For those willing to surrender to its rhythm, it offers a rare, tender look at women reclaiming desire in a city that gives them no room. Payal Kapadia has crafted a quiet masterpiece that refuses to shout for attention, yet demands to be felt. It may not be for everyone, but for those it touches, it will linger like the memory of a beach at twilight-fading, but never quite gone.

Rating: 8.1/10
Recommended for: Lovers of slow-cinema, anyone who has ever felt invisible in a crowd.