Another unmissable stunner that follows four displaced, touch-starved dreamers who refuse to accept adriftness as their lot in life, filmmaker Anuparna Roy returns with a sophomore feature as emotionally unsparing as it is breezily poetic. “Lovers in the Blue Night” is a swift follow-up for the Indian up-and-comer, having just won a historic Venice Horizons Best Director prize for last year’s dreamy two-hander “Songs of Forgotten Trees,” where her similarly Mumbai-set latest, with some crew and cast members in common, made its premiere.
The film opens with a storm rolling in and severe flooding, as a voice blares on the wind, reminding would-be refugees to register at the local police station to be allowed into the shelters. A group of survivors in distinctive garb endure the biting cold. And then the title card abruptly drops with a hint of foreboding. Here is India seen from its physical and social margins, where survival means assimilating into a sort of bureaucratic hell, where affinities are frayed by one’s caste.
From the get-go, Roy clarifies her project’s central preoccupation: the desire for love and better living conditions in an environment where it’s easy to be discarded. Though the characters remain nameless for about 30 minutes, their predicaments soon snap into focus. All of them have moved to Mumbai from Bangladesh and other parts of India.
Karim (Pritam Pilaniam, at once gentle and wounding) is a reclusive, closeted gay man who has married Ameena (Neelima Sharma) out of the pitiful fact that floods swept away their village. They share the same bed, but have never had sex and barely talk intimately. Like two people who just happen to live under the same roof, the partition between them couldn’t be more vividly felt. Working as an erotic phone performer in a sketchy bar, Ameena, thank god, finds tenderness and temporary relief in mysterious letters from an obsessed client, whose identity she has mistaken for the bar’s lonely pimp Omran (Jatin Sarin). Moments where those letters are read in the voiceover give way to a more impressionistic film, like a memory too hazy for one to make out. Meanwhile, small-time thief Sukka (Bhushan Shimpi), who lives with his higher-caste girlfriend out of wedlock, similarly wrestles with risk (partly because of his means of living), shame, and repressed desire.
The movie really gets moving when Karim and Sukka begin to open up to each other, much like Ameena and Omran strike up an unexpected romance. These characters are clearly desperate for connections but have no clue how to realize that. And even then, Roy seems less concerned with plot progression than she is with teasing out what a place as puritanical as this version of Mumbai does to people.
To that end, the director and her returning cinematographer Debjit Samanta make room for the emotional walls of these restless undesirables by framing them largely within confined physical environments: seedy pleasure chambers, shoebox-sized apartments, cramped lockers, and mosquito-netted bedrooms, to name a few. Such spaces stand in stark contrast to the wealthy homes Sukka and his band of thieves — later including Karim, with his skill at making rat poison coming in handy — burgle and keep a watchful eye on. Elsewhere, though, Roy and Samanta make use of majestic coastal surroundings, if only to remind the characters of either the vastness of absence haunting them or the possibilities ahead.
Through this potent visual treatment steeped in wistful shades of blue, alongside Karan Gupta’s equally lived-in production design, “Lovers in the Blue Night” captures the contours of the protagonists’ working-class lives and the ways in which they shrink themselves under the isolating big city — and how love can somehow fit into that precarious equation.
There are scenes where Roy makes her political messaging more pronounced, at times tending toward the melodramatic, such as when Karim and Sukka join a paid protest for a vote-buying politician, or when characters are constantly asked where they are really from. The film suggests these migrants belong to this perceived “city of dreams” only when they are useful to people who keep those dreams far out of reach. They are resigned to a life where their identity is mocked and at the same time exploited.
A stifling air of homophobia also hangs over the film. A sudden incident involving Sukka and his partner further destabilizes the former’s attachment to Karim, and later yields a charged moment of punching and tussling on the ground, showing how men would rather couch affection in brute force than confront their own shame.
Echoes of Payal Kapadia’s oneiric and delicately composed “All We Imagine as Light” are there for those who choose to see it. Like that film, here a woman becomes the story’s heart and soul, a sliver of hope in a landscape almost bereft of it. When Ameena decides to move past her ill-fated relationship, it’s less about her immediate future being guaranteed — as Roy spares viewers from a neatly conclusive endnote — and more about finally having the chance to make the decision herself and hold it in the palm of her hand. Sharma imbues her performance with the warmth and quietude that pierce the straitlaced reality around her character. Through her, Roy shows how desire can be so primal even in environments estranged from it.
Roy sustains the sense of dislocation to devastating, ambiguous ends. Perhaps she reckoned that anything too cheery and crystalline may have verged on insincerity. What remains ultimately are residues of lives still figuring out how to wend onward.
Grade: B+
“Lovers in the Blue Night” premiered at the 2026 Venice Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
