“The film is at its most interesting when it approaches its characters not as social symbols but as people who are simply desperate for some form of intimacy.”
Anuparna Roy returns to Venice with Lovers in the Blue Night, her second feature after Songs of Forgotten Trees, the film that made her the first Indian filmmaker to win the Orizzonti Best Director award at the Venice Film Festival in 2025. Her return to the same competition with a second consecutive feature is in itself remarkable. But if Songs of Forgotten Trees announced the arrival of a distinctive filmmaker, Lovers in the Blue Night feels more like a film searching for the language in which that filmmaker might fully express herself.
Set in Mumbai, the film follows four migrants whose lives gradually intersect: Karim, a closeted gay man living with Ameena, the wife he married out of pity; Ameena, who works in a bar and longs for tenderness; Sukka, a small-time thief burdened by caste and desperate for acceptance; and Omran, a pimp whose own loneliness sits beneath his outward hardness. Their stories become entangled through desire, deception, survival and the need to be loved. The film moves through Hindi, Sylheti Bengali and Marathi, giving its Mumbai setting a linguistic texture that reflects the fractured identities of its characters.
There is a genuinely moving idea at the centre of the film. Roy has spoken about her childhood memory of a bonded labourer named Ameena in Purulia. As a child, Roy once asked Ameena why she and her husband Karim did not sleep together. Ameena’s answer stayed with her, eventually becoming the emotional seed for this film. Lovers in the Blue Night takes that memory and imagines another life for Ameena in Mumbai, one in which she is allowed to desire, to imagine love, and perhaps to make choices of her own. That personal origin is important because the film is at its most interesting when it approaches its characters not as social symbols but as people who are simply desperate for some form of intimacy. Its world is populated by migrants, working-class people, queer desire, caste anxiety, sexual exploitation and economic precarity. Yet Roy is less interested in making a conventional social-realist statement than in observing how these people negotiate their need to be seen.
Unfortunately, this is also where the film’s biggest problems begin. The writing is not consistently strong enough to sustain the emotional and thematic ambitions of the film. The story itself is relatively thin, and some of the dramatic developments feel more like mechanisms for bringing the characters together than discoveries that emerge naturally from their personalities. The film has a fascinating premise, but the premise is often more compelling than the screenplay built around it.
The rhythm is similarly confusing. There are moments when the film appears to be deliberately slowing down to create a contemplative atmosphere, but the pacing does not always feel purposeful. Instead, the transitions between scenes and emotional states can feel uncertain, as though the film has not completely decided what kind of rhythm it wants to inhabit. Slow cinema does not necessarily need to be monotonous, but its duration needs to have an internal logic. Here, that logic is not always apparent.
This raises another question: how much of the film’s roughness comes from its production circumstances? I genuinely do not know whether Lovers in the Blue Night should be understood as a very low-budget or almost no-budget production, and I would be hesitant to make that claim without knowing the actual production budget. But low-budget cinema itself is not an excuse for aesthetic incompleteness. Lav Diaz, particularly in the early part of his career, made films with extremely limited resources, yet those limitations could become part of the films’ extraordinary artistic character. The poverty of means was transformed into an abundance of cinematic possibility. Lovers in the Blue Night does not always achieve that transformation. There are several scenes that are genuinely interesting, moments in which Roy’s sensitivity to marginal lives, bodies and fleeting human connections becomes visible. But those moments are not frequent or sustained enough. They appear almost like glimpses of the film that could have existed. This is especially frustrating because Roy seems to have a real instinct for intimacy.
The intimacy in Lovers in the Blue Night could have existed on another level entirely. The film repeatedly approaches something emotionally raw and complicated, only to retreat before fully entering it. There are situations here, between Karim and Sukka, between Ameena and the imagined figure behind some mysterious letters, and even within the uneasy relationships created by survival, that could have become extraordinarily intimate. But again and again, the film gets close without quite arriving. That may be the most significant thing Roy needs to work on as a filmmaker: trusting intimacy more deeply. Instead of simply presenting characters who are lonely, the film needs to discover the specific ways in which their loneliness changes the way they touch, speak, lie, desire and look at one another. The emotional possibilities are there, but they are often left unexplored.
The cinematography by Debjit Samanta also feels like a missed opportunity. Mumbai at night should be an incredibly fertile cinematic space for this story, a city of artificial light, crowded rooms, transient bodies, loneliness and anonymity. The film has access to an environment that could visually externalise its characters’ emotional states, but the imagery does not consistently reach the level of visual invention that the material demands. The cinematography could have been far more adventurous, especially in the treatment of night, urban space and physical intimacy.
And yet, it would be unfair to dismiss the film simply because it does not fulfil all of its ambitions. There is something sincere in Lovers in the Blue Night. Roy’s interest in people who exist at the edges of social visibility feels genuine. Her characters are not merely vehicles for political themes; they are people who want something painfully ordinary: to be loved, touched, accepted, desired, or simply recognised. That fundamental human longing gives the film its strongest moments. The title itself is revealing. These are lovers of the night, not necessarily because they belong to the night, but because the night gives them a temporary space in which they can become something other than what society expects them to be. Mumbai becomes both refuge and trap: a place where anonymity allows desire to exist, but where survival constantly threatens to overwhelm it.
And perhaps that is why the film remains intriguing despite its shortcomings. Roy is clearly reaching for something larger than the story she has been able to construct. The film contains the beginnings of a powerful cinematic language, one concerned with migration, desire, class, caste, sexuality and the strange forms of intimacy that emerge between people who have very little to give each other. Her achievement at Venice with Songs of Forgotten Trees inevitably raised expectations. That film’s Best Director award established Roy as one of the most distinctive new voices in Indian independent cinema, and Lovers in the Blue Night is an extraordinary achievement in itself. Yet a filmmaker’s journey is rarely a straight line. Sometimes, the more revealing film is the imperfect one: the film in which an artist is still searching, taking risks, and reaching towards something just beyond what she has already mastered.
Lovers in the Blue Night feels like a film in the process of discovering what it wants to become and there are places where the writing could have been more precise, the rhythm more assured, the cinematography more expressive, and the story more deeply developed. Above all, one wishes Roy had allowed herself to go even further into the most intimate moments—to stay a little longer with her characters, and to trust the silences, gestures and emotional uncertainties between them. But there is something deeply encouraging about a film that reaches, even when it does not always take hold. There are moments when Roy’s particular sensitivity comes through with real force, and those moments suggest a filmmaker whose emotional and cinematic vocabulary is still expanding.
Perhaps that is what makes the film worth embracing alongside its imperfections. It does not always become the extraordinary work it seems to be aiming for, but every now and then, it gives us a beautiful glimpse of that possibility. And sometimes, witnessing a filmmaker reach towards something larger than what she has achieved before is itself a deeply moving experience.