All We Imagine as Light Review | A Rooted Character Drama That Deserved a Stronger Final Act

Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light, which won the prestigious Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, is a character exploration that sort of shows the evolution and companionship of two women who were at different stages in their respective lives. While you do get to see a sensitive and pure portrayal of the vulnerabilities and unsureness of the main characters in the film, the final act of All We Imagine As Light is slightly weak in terms of how we resonate with the sense of closure and acceptance the characters in the movie feel.

So the movie is set against the backdrop of the busy Mumbai city, and we have two Malayali nurses, Prabha and Anu, working in a hospital, along with Parvaty, a Marathi lady who also works in the same hospital. These three individuals are going through various kinds of issues in their lives. Parvaty doesn’t have the legal papers of her house, and Prabha is seeking closure from her first marriage as her husband has practically abandoned her. The youngest, Anu, is unsure about the whole idea of marriage. The journey of these three characters towards emotional clarity is what we see in All We Imagine as Light.

The movie opens with this voice-over of various working-class people from diverse backdrops talking about the city and how it functions. In the first half of the movie, the film is entirely happening in Mumbai, and the drama in the story echoes the limitations and confinements of the city. Prabha is not able to accept the freedom Anu enjoys in her relationship. Anu hates the last-minute plan cancellations in her relationship due to societal norms. In the case of Parvaty, the struggle is harsher as she is fighting for something very basic.

The movie shifts to the calmness of the village when these three are sort of at a point where they want a resolution for the conflict happening in their head. Payal prioritizes the track of Prabha in that space as the dilemma looks more grey in her story. She craves love, but at the same time, she is unsure about what her abandoned husband has in his mind as he had sent a gift for her from Germany. So Payal uses Prabha’s journey of finding closure in her relationship as this tool to support Anu, who is unsure about her love life and its future.

The most creative scene, in my opinion, was the sequence where Prabha had a hallucinated conversation with a man she saved from the beach. It sort of keeps us guessing, and it felt like an imaginative way of showing how such an introverted person finds closure. A larger part of the screenplay is investing in showing the routine of these characters. Usually, through various details, you sort of get an in-depth idea about the history of these characters. Somewhere, I felt the lack of enough details for us to root for these characters was weakening the film’s final act. The musical high they achieved in the very last moment of the movie demanded a little more in terms of character detail. The grainy, soft-focus visual texture adds a sense of rawness to the frames.

One thing that most of the time annoys me when I watch movies made by non-Keralite filmmakers about Kerala or Malayalis is the usage of Malayalam. All We Imagine as Light has made sure that the linguistic authenticity is solid. Kani Kusruti, as Prabha, gets to play this middle-aged woman who is stuck between certain societal standards. We can see her as this elderly, supportive sister figure for Anu, who is sort of afraid and a bit jealous about the liberation Anu enjoys. In the second half, the village and setting become a reason for Prabha’s transformation, and Kani portrays that evolution effectively on screen. Coming to Divyaprabha, who performed the part of Anu, the performance had the danger of being overdone as there is a sense of frivolousness around Anu’s confidence to be with her lover Shiaz. But Divyaprabha manages to crack a balance between staying silly and, at the same time, not being a caricature. Chhaya Kadam’s character’s screen time is relatively minimal, but she carried the heftiness of Parvaty’s life experiences beautifully in her performance. Hridhu Haroon and Azees Nedumangad are the other names in the movie’s supporting cast, and their performances also looked convincing.

All We Imagine as Light is not a pretentious creation that feels like a redundant iteration of female struggle. It is striving to create a drama from a bunch of rooted characters, and to an extent, we are in a curious space to know how these characters will evolve. If that transition, which happens in the final portions of the movie, had a stronger base for us to feel the mindset change in them, I think the movie would have been a spectacular character drama.