‘Lovers In The Blue Night’ review: Anapurna Roy’s modest second feature interweaves migrant lives and loves in Mumbai

Dir: Anuparna Roy. India/USA. 2026. 107mins

Four migrant characters in Mumbai share a multistranded mainly Hindi-language (with some Sylheti Bengali and Marathi) tale from writer-director Anuparna Roy, who returns to Venice Horizons having won the sidebar’s best director prize in 2025 for her debut Songs of Forgotten Trees; the first Indian director to do so. That feature was a two-hander about a pair of unmarried working class women scraping by in Mumbai, and Roy’s follow-up tracks a similar quartet – three men and a woman – being likewise preoccupied with the challenges of balancing some modicum of personal fulfilment against breadline economic survival.

A small film but, in its own way, quietly radical

The film is evidently filmed on a spartan budget, the precarious finances of the protagonists finding their filmic echoes in the needs-must production values of the film. Lovers In The Blue Night is a modest feature, which may impede its ability to break out commercially, although further festivals will likely take an interest.

Strongest of the interwoven narratives is that concerning Karim (a sensitive performance from Pritam Pilania, returning to work with Roy after a supporting role in her debut), who works as a rat-poisoner, somewhat tenderly burying the small corpses that are the result of his labour. As a closeted gay man, he has also attempted bury his own desires; not least because he has genuine affection for his wife Ameena (Neelima Sharma).

Or perhaps affection is overstating it: she’s very lonely and he feels sorry for her; he married her to help her out, and they’re from the same small village which has been devastated by floods – but he can’t share with her why he seems so distant. This leaves Ameena emotionally high and dry, desperate for connection – which is ironic given her job in a bar, where she sits in a cubicle having telephone conversations with men in an adjacent cubicle. She begins to receive letters, and imagines they might be from Omran (Jatin Sarin), one of the pimps involved in the running of the bar. 

Karim, meanwhile, begins a tentative sexual relationship with small-time criminal Sukka (Bhushan Shimpi, in a splendidly lively and plausible performance), but it’s clear that it isn’t going to go anywhere productive given their respective situations. The theme of this relationship – and some of the others too – is how alive it makes the participants feel. Karim expresses this literally: for him, Sukka is the only person who is actually alive in what he refers to as a field of corpses.

The idea that love is what makes life worth living is not an especially rare one in cinema, but the flipside isn’t articulated as often: the idea that life without love is a form of living death. Perhaps that’s particularly true when options for a fulfilling career are likewise limited: none of the characters here are working in any of their dream jobs

Roy clearly cares deeply for all her characters. It’s unclear whether the movie’s tendency to pull its punches around subjects like sex is the result of intentionally discreet self-censorship or due to loyalty to conservative cultural norms. Whatever the reason, there is a sense of holding back here – though, of course, narratively centring pimps, sex workers and hustlers in their own stories is still a bold move for a filmmaker operating in the cultural context of a country that didn’t repeal a British colonial-era ban on homosexuality until 2018. This is a small film but in its own way, quietly radical.