If on a Winter’s Night

All We Imagine as Light director Payal Kapadia is executive producer on another film about the insecurities of Malayali internal migrants from Kerala in a Hindi-speaking metropolis—in this case Delhi, where loving young couple Sarah (Bhanu Priyamvada) and Abhi (Roshan Abdool Rahoof) have moved. Escaping Sarah’s overbearing and patriarchal family—but only up to a point—they find themselves facing a different kind of scrutiny as outsiders in the big city, struggling to keep up in a language they don’t understand, with their every flick of a light switch monitored by an overbearing landlady. Abhi is an artist whose plans for an exhibition keep getting deferred, while Sarah works brutal, thankless hours as seasonal support staff at an international film festival. Sarah and Abhi’s dream of cosmopolitan reinvention crumbles alongside their romantic images of themselves and each other in Sanju Surendran’s closely observed and propulsively edited drama, which mercilessly maps a chasm between two people as it’s driven open by economic stress.