Anu (2023) “IFFLA” Short Film Review – A Quietly Shattering Snapshot of Loss

Grief and widowhood are rendered many shades sadder and lonelier in Pulkit Arora’s short film, Anu. There’s a wrenching grasping for a coiled-up emotional release, a process of coming to terms with a loss that threatens to be all-enveloping. How does one initiate that painful, crushing journey of stepping back and accepting after the loss of a loved one? It is a desperately private process, one attuned to selfhood, despite the veneer of a communal construct that builds around such circumstances. Navigating one’s desire to keep holding and the unexpressed need to tear away is what Arora captures with succinct strokes in his short “Anu.”

The film entirely takes place inside a hotel room in New Zealand, where Anu (Prabha Ravi) is quarantining before she meets her son. Her husband has just recently passed away. The moment she arrives in her room, she puts his overcoat on a chair. She scrolls through their WhatsApp chats, rereading old messages and listening to his voice notes confirming regular grocery shopping lists. Through these, she hopes to retain a touch of him, yearning for things as they were, a shared life with him as it was. These little scraps offer us a glimpse into a marriage that thrives on love and care for the other.

Arora’s gaze holds a tenderness that’s somber and immensely moving, working in a stripped-back, muted tenor. There’s not a hint of maudlin to the proceedings as Anu prepares a small pind-daan in the room itself, picking up the methods from YouTube tutorials. When the film skates close to the emotionally niggling, Arora reins in. The starkness of the room constantly accentuates the circumstance, splicing in layers of gravitas and emotional weight that seem to hover around the protagonist. The visual bareness enables the film to acquire an emotional charge that stems from the character containing her anguish within herself, tightening and simmering.

In a mostly wordless performance, Prabha Ravi is ceaselessly captivating, every inch of her being exuding her fraught, shaky emotional state. There’s a generosity in the confidence with which the film is allowed to pivot wholly on the actress to articulate an inner emotional journey without any superfluity. Unlike a profusion of films made on similar themes, Anu stands out in its immediate, palpable respect for its central character and what she is undergoing. There’s nary an effort to pad it up with any diverting elements. The concentrated ache of the film makes it slowly and quietly gutting. 

Anu screened at the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles (IFFLA) 2023

Anu (2023) Short Film Link: IMDb
Anu (2023) Short Film Cast: Prabha Ravi, Pulkit Arora, Bharat Bhushan, Jessie Lawrence