‘Shadowbox’ review: Indian debut boasts ‘storytelling of economy and elegance’

Dir. Tanushree Das, Saumyananda Sahi. India/France/USA/Spain. 2025. 93mins

Maya (Tillotama Shome) is accustomed to taking the lead in her marriage to Sundar (Chandan Bisht), a former army officer who is debilitated by severe PTSD. Against the advice of her judgmental and disapproving family, she works multiple jobs in the suburbs of Calcutta to support him, and gently coaxes him towards opportunities that might suit his limited abilities. But when Sundar disappears in suspicious circumstances, Maya’s resourcefulness is pushed to breaking point. The feature directing debut from Tanushree Das and Saumyananda Sahi takes a sensitive, low-key approach to the theme of mental illness, told from the point of a carer who has, the film suggests, already endured more than her fair share of familial dramas.

Storytelling of economy and elegance

Premiering in Berlin’s Perspectives, the film marks the first feature directing collaboration of Calcutta-born editor Tanushree Das, whose previous credits include Eeb Allay Ooo!, which screened at Berlin in 2020 and won a prize at the Mumbai International Film Festival, and cinematographer Saumyananda Sahi, who also worked on Eeb Allay Ooo! as well as Shaunak Sen’s Oscar-nominated documentary All That Breathes, and who lenses here. (Sen serves as a producer on this project.) It’s an involving, impressively acted picture which, while it might not have the broader impact of something like All We Imagine As Light, is likely to benefit from current interest in quality, female-led Indian independent cinema.

Maya approaches each challenging day with the stoicism of a woman who is painfully aware that her family’s survival rests on her shoulders. Brisk, businesslike and efficient, she moves at twice the speed of the men in the household. Her teenage son Debu (Sayan Karmakar) is glued to his phone. Sundar, sleeping off the liquor from the night before, is impossible to rouse. He’s still unresponsive when Maya bustles out to the first of her jobs, delivering the ironing that she worked through the night before.

She dares to hope that today might be the day that Sundar gets a job, through an appointment that her brother has grudgingly brokered on her behalf. But as Maya hurries between her various workplaces – she also cleans a house and helps out at a grim-looking poultry business – Sundar fails to make it to the interview. It’s unlikely that it would have been much use if he had shown up. Eyes clouded with incomprehension, words blurred by drink, Sundar is no longer the man she married (against the wishes of her unsympathetic family), and still loves. Debu’s relationship with his father is complex – he finds himself cast in the role of carer and defender, but squirms with adolescent embarrassment when his dad, derisively nicknamed ’Chief Minister’, makes a public spectacle of himself once again.

When Sundar vanishes during the night, it is not long before the police become involved – Sundar’s alcoholic drinking buddy has been murdered and Sundar is the main suspect. The busy sound design, hitherto cluttered with crickets, birds and the ambient sounds of the city, takes on an oppressive quality, poisoned by the sour whispers of gossipy neighbours and Maya’s work colleagues. Her family makes no secret that they view her current plight as a vindication of their resistance to the marriage.

Yet Shome imbues Maya with the quiet strength and determination of someone who has already weathered the very worst of times – a love marriage opposed by her family and his, her husband’s dishonourable discharge from the army, his sickness and slide into alcohol abuse. What is perhaps most impressive about the film’s approach is how little is overtly spelled out, and how much we understand about Maya’s troubled past without the need for unwieldy chunks of exposition. This is storytelling of economy and elegance.