The stasis of old age rendered with precise strokes becomes not just a theme but an emotional landscape, where caregiving, memory, and routine merge into a quiet, unspoken meditation on existence.

FILM REVIEW/Alaav (Director: Prabhash Chandra) By: Saibal Chatterjee

Alaav – Hearth and Home is a powerful, deeply meditative film about ageing, care and the emotional toll of long-term responsibility. Written and directed by Prabhash Chandra, the film captures the slow rhythm of life, the fragility of the human body, and the resilience of love. With long takes, minimal dialogue, and intimate cinematography, it stands apart as one of the most quietly affecting Indian independent films of recent years, resonating with audiences at global festivals for its authenticity and emotional precision. 

Life stands still and yet flows inexorably in Alaav – Hearth and Home, written and directed by Prabhash Chandra. The uncompromisingly austere film approximates the restrained tempo of existence when old age takes its toll on both the giver and recipient of geriatric care.

With its meticulously composed frames and strikingly unhurried rhythm, Alaav delineates the weight of ageing and its repercussions on a 95-year-old woman and her sexagenarian son sheltered in a well-appointed Delhi home.

Alaav competed at the Festival des 3 Continents in Nantes last year and played at the Dharamshala International Film Festival 2025. It is slated to screen next in the International Film Festival of Kerala’s Indian Cinema Now strand this month.

The film’s two principal actors play themselves – mother and son caught in a routine that begins and ends on the same note every single day. Bhaveen (Bhaveen Gossain) is a 63-year-old tanpura player whose commitment to music echoes his devotion to his dementia-afflicted mother, Savitri (Savitri Gossain), who needs her son’s undivided attention.

The walls of the living room and other parts of the house are covered with framed portraits – tell-tale evidence not only of an artistic legacy but also of an active past.

Alaav does not, however, attempt in overt ways to fill us in with details of the lives that Savitri and Bhaveen might have had in the days when the former was a sturdier woman, and her home wasn’t a confinement. All that the film shows us is that extreme old age has drained Savitri of all physical strength and dulled her mental faculties. Taking care of her calls for immense patience and fortitude. Bhaveen has plenty of both.

But he isn’t getting any younger. The passage of time is beginning to have an effect on him, too. Yet, his sense of responsibility does not waver – it borders on a form of piety that comes naturally to a Hindustani classical music exponent accustomed to regimen.

Time as Stillness

Bhaveen’s world – once clearly full of action, as a flyer (it emerges from under a mattress) announcing his involvement in a play based on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot reveals – has now shrunk into the repetitive minutiae of caregiving.

The tedium is clear. He feeds his infirm mother, makes the bed for her, watches her fall asleep, assists her with her ablutions, combs her hair, helps her remove her dentures, talks to her like one would to a child although his words scarcely register on her, and even reprimands her. It is a grind, but it is something that Bhaveen does willingly.

The film takes us into the home and ensures that we stay anchored there. It combines intimacy with detachment. All its shots are from within the house. It is only late in its two-hour runtime that the film allows itself to look in from the outside, through the glass panes and grille of the windows.

We watch Bhaveen go about his onerous task. Unsurprisingly, he betrays a couple of flashes of fatigue and frustration that manifest themselves in brief outbursts of irritation.

Care as Devotion

Bhaveen’s connection with the outside world is now limited to his students. They occasionally walk in through the door, take lessons from him and then depart, leaving him to confront the monotony that is now an essential part of his existence.

In one scene, Bhaveen reads Oscar Wilde’s “The Harlot’s House” to a young student, a girl who has her entire life ahead of her. She has secured a two-year scholarship in France.

The poem, which alludes to the automaton-like mechanical rhythm of life in a brothel, may not define Bhaveen’s current state with absolute exactitude but it does tangentially reflect the bleakness that surrounds him.

Art as Memory

The chores that Bhaveen performs as each day progresses and turns into night before giving way to another morning are unchanging. The director and cinematographer, Vikas Urs, find methods to depict the cyclical mother-son exchanges – the woman barely speaks – without letting any of it sink into visual drabness.

The moments between son and mother are captured through 30-odd long takes uninterrupted by any camera movement. But not a single angle of the house or the bed is repeated. Every frame offers a new perspective, with doors, walls and furniture holding a key place in the compositions.

With its rigid structure, Alaav brings the rigour of a bandish to bear upon filmmaking. The stasis of Bhaveen’s life is contrasted with, and mirrored by, the constraints, rules and techniques that shape a classical music composition.

We watch and hear Bhaveen do his riyaaz or tutor a student, which lends the film a haunting soundtrack, while he devotes all his free time to attending to his mother. The two spheres merge and give the film its core.

Alaav isn’t an easy watch, but such is the precision of the rendering that it is difficult to take one’s eyes off the screen.

Every moment, every prop (including something as mundane as Bhaveen’s teacup, a consistent presence in scene after scene), and every gesture, all unfailingly lifelike, exudes meaning and resonance.