Bhoomi (Priyanka Kumar) and Akash (Vijay Krishna) invite their close-knit friends to celebrate their fifth year of being in a relationship. A fun night, propelled by the couple’s musical performance, turns sour when the two break into an argument. Blame game follows, with both of them calling each other selfish.

The impetus for the fight is as small as Akash, a violinist, overshadowing Bhoomi, a flautist, during their performance. Why are they so fragile in understanding each other despite being together for five years? Well, if time were a measure of a relationship’s health, we wouldn’t have witnessed late-life divorces.

Mansore’s Doora Theera Yaana is a serious relationship drama that speaks about the importance of communication in relationships. The director tries to understand the psyche of people who hold on to a relationship without expressing their expectations from it, primarily out the fear of losing each other.

Akash and Bhoomi decide to go on a one-week vacation to talk their hearts out and decide on their next big step of marriage. From the start, Mansore lays bare the complexities in relationships. What you wear and where you go is often decided by your partner and your response is just a silent agreement.

A still from ‘Doora Theera Yaana’.
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement

Amid the tensions, every moment of understanding feels like a small victory for Bhoomi and Akash. And after every heated exchange, they show up the next day and work out a plan, the best way to make the relationship work. Doora Theera Yaana is filled with such sincere and relatable moments.

The couple has it in them to be in great sync during their musical performances. But, marriage isn’t a stage show. You either grind it out daily or break up to live on your own terms. Mansore’s film is a weighty drama that focuses more on the concept of love than on the process of falling in love.

My favourite scene is the one where Akash talks about how he is trying hard to overcome his insensitive nature. During the same conversation, Bhoomi fears that Akash resembles her dad in personality, with both men not understanding what she wants. These are genuine concerns seen in people in love, so often forgotten by writer-directors dealing with the genre. 

Despite being a road film, Doora Theera Yaana doesn’t use nature as a tool to deliver a picturesque experience. In the metaphor-heavy film, the sea is compared with a relationship, as Akash’s friend, a fisherman, talks about how one can’t measure the depth of the ocean without getting to the bottom of it. The melancholic cinematography and the soothing music maintain the soul-searching mood of the central characters, ensuring that the audience aren’t distracted by the beauty of the backdrop.

ALSO READ:‘Hebbuli Cut’ movie review: A sharp narrative on caste bias with an engaging screenplay

In the final act, we are told how Akash and Bhoomi are chalk and cheese in their worldviews. Bhoomi is career-oriented while Akash, perhaps, wants to see where he goes with his musical talent, before thinking of settling down with a full-time job. The manner in which the couple understands that they want separate things from each other is quite unconvincing. During the trip, Akash and Bhoomi meet strangers, who come across as therapists offering a different perspective on life and relationships. Mansore spends very little time on this plot point, reducing the intended impact of the idea.

The over-reliance on poetic language dents the organic flow of Doora Theera Yaana. I wish the film relied on circumstances to reveal the true selves of the characters. I wish the film had a lot more intensity during its closing portions. From the trivial, the arguments had to get more weighty. When a line in one of the songs says, ‘There is heaviness stirring inside despite being relieved’, you had to feel the pain of separation. That said, Doora Theera Yaana is a one-of-its-kind attempt in Kannada cinema. A full-fledged drama in the era of event films is a bold step.

Doora Theera Yaana is currently running in theatres

Published – July 11, 2025 07:05 pm IST

NEW YORK – It’s too simplistic to refer to “Sorry, Baby” (A24) as a #MeToo movie. Yet the film is topical as well as important and compelling.

There was a time when its main plot point would only have been shared woman-to-woman. That was before daytime TV programs and nighttime dramas brought in light to dissipate shame.

Even today, writer-director Eva Victor’s picture, in which she also stars, is anything but easy viewing. Yet, while the tale it tells is sometimes painful, it’s intimate and droll as well.

This is one woman’s frank account of a sexual assault and of her recovery. It involves harsh satirical portrayals of authority figures, including the police, who fail to help her seek justice. Instead, she has to figure out her own path forward, one awkward step at a time.

Victor plays Agnes, a promising graduate student at a small, rural New England university. The story is laid out in five chapters, each representing a year. But these are not dealt with chronologically. Some shuttling back and forth is needed in order to explain fully her relationships to other characters.

Agnes has a best friend and onetime housemate, Lydie (Naomi Ackie), with whom she shares all her deepest thoughts, while her love of literature and aspirations to become a writer are encouraged by her faculty thesis adviser, Professor Decker (Louis Cancelmi). Decker, it turns out, however, is less a nurturing mentor than a predator.

The attack itself is not seen. Victor shows long shots of Decker’s house, where the incident takes place, over a series of hours, ending with Agnes stumbling out in shock.

She tells Lydie about it in detail while in a tub, going over every confusing moment. Agnes already knows, before the police tell her, that it’s too late for a rape kit. But she’s further crushed to find that the university will do nothing to hold Decker to account, since he resigned the day after committing his crime.

Agnes is not pregnant, and there is no mention of abortion as a possible outcome.

“I can feel in my body that it was really bad,” Agnes says. “But there’s a reason, even if I can’t see it.”

The rest of the movie shows how Agnes, instead of giving way to anger and embitterment, builds her coping skills in the midst of routine activities. These include jury duty, a potential trigger for reviving the trauma.

In another brief scene, Decker is revealed to have preyed on one of Agnes’ classmates as well.

Most impressively, Agnes joins the faculty, moves into Decker’s former office and becomes an instinctively sensitive teacher of difficult fictional texts. Collapsing in anguish is not something she ever considers an option. She moves on courageously, although this is not done by forgetting, but rather by attempting to accumulate wisdom.

The film contains three scenes of implied sexual activity, mature material, including a sexual assault theme, an incidental homosexual relationship and an out-of-wedlock pregnancy, occasional banter and intermittent rough language. The OSV News classification is L — limited adult audience, films whose problematic content many adults would find troubling. The Motion Picture Association rating is R — restricted. Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian.

Copyright © 2025 OSV News

 Print

In Mahde Hasan’s feature debut, “Sand City,” a tight, clipped psychosis of disaffection rips through its atmosphere. There’s a stifling thrust cities exert as Dhaka does in the film. Where’s the release? Mauled by a city’s pummelling of daily routines, how do you inch towards a smidgen of fresh possibility? A faith in transcendence is snipped by the brutal drudgery synonymous with scratching out a life of dignity. How do you endure with grace when battered by daily banality?

“Sand City” spins around two characters. Emma (Victoria Chakma), a woman from an ethnic minority population, exits her office only to discover slurs scrawled on her bike. It happens on a daily basis. The guard claims he hasn’t a clue who’s behind it. Rather, he redirects insinuations at her, implying: why is it that only she is targeted? She must be doing something that attracts a particular kind of image. At work, Emma is mostly disconnected. She’s seen as an outsider, an anomaly.

The other character is Hasan (Mostafa Monwar), who slaves away at a glass plant with a gradually swelling plot of making his own. He collects several materials, including silica sand, and stores them at home. Emma also hauls off sand for her cat litter. Sand binds the two strangers. She feels edged out in most spaces, receding thereby to her own little corner. There’s no comfort she receives or warmth from kindred others. He’s biding his time, rosy-eyed about the big, brilliant future his project’s success can bring him.

Hasan orchestrates the city-space’s discombobulating effects with precision and austerity. Smoggy landscapes accentuate a deep-set sense of doom and collapse. There’s despair and disillusionment, but it’s purposefully muted. The film drives the kind of morass that seems inescapable, binding on all fronts. Dream as you may; turning the tide is futile, crashing past any mild fluttering of the heart.

Hasan is terrifically confident in handling silences. Long wordless stretches dominate much of the film, a sandbox for you to decipher and project what characters may be feeling at any given point. There’s a distance, a chasm in place between Hasan and Emma, though a few interstices come up sometimes. But what’s felt more keenly is people being strung apart, socio-economic vectors firmly in place.

It’s a cold hollowness that creeps up on individuals. They have dreams which they pursue tenderly, secretly. Hope is so delicate it might shatter, should they recklessly share, open up their hearts. Giombini’s sharply sculpted framing prises out the city and its deadening blow. It’s a stark, alienating atmosphere we are slowly dipped into. Hasan has no interest in setting up a conventional structure, with easily discernible narrative beats. Instead, he and Giombini imbue “Sand City” with a moodier drift. The blue glowing nights draping over Emma are as striking as evocations of the netherworld in the wasteyards Hasan scavenges through.

Characters don’t navigate the city as much as they are stuck within fixed routes. It’s a stasis that chews into the fibre of their lives. They don’t know how to find their footing if they take a plunge. Hasan does fling himself out there more demonstratively. However, their emotional, psychological isolation gnaws like an open wound. Amidst a space crunch, individuals are severed from any form of affectionate intimacy. The daily struggle for sustenance might not be the same for all. Some, like Emma, occupy a more privileged status.

But fulfilment remains elusive. People wander, aching for some anchorage that’s also affirming. Emma is waiting for visa issues to get sorted, so she can fly out of the country. Rarely do we witness the characters sharing a meaningful, grounding bond with others. Both Emma and Hasan are hemmed in. The latter is hopeful about his big project. But the city’s ruthlessness soon rams into him. To leap at salvation of some kind is exposed bleakly, rudely as a sorry quest. The promise of a renewed future stays suspended.

Mahde Hasan bends the film into a visually stunning drama. Most of the undercurrents are riven into Oronnok Prithibi’s sound design, which unleash vividly seething sensations in both crucial moments, like a heightened, shocked discovery, and regular, mundane rhythms. “Sand City” splays grimness into a vacuum that nags both its characters. Each yearns and jostles with the city’s grind. How much will they yield to it? They have to perennially deal with the interplay between resignation and resistance.

The latter is most terrifying, but the final choice, they hope, will make a difference. The director stitches in jolting, disquieting revelations, aided by Prithibi’s piercing, bracing sound design. The clang of construction noise, as the city expands unto itself in all its congestion, works as a constant reminder of the larger scale. A sliver of genuine human connection seems out of reach for both the characters. For Emma, it manifests through an uncanny intrusion. With defiant interruptions and daring ellipsis, Mahde Hasan twists “Sand City” into something evasively peculiar, singular, and unforgettable.

Sand City premiered at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival 2025.

Sand City (2025) Movie Links: IMDb