Twenty four is too young to think about death, let alone make a melancholic meditative movie on mortality. Debutant Shubhashish Bhutiani’s (who was all of 24) Mukti Bhawan, released on April 7 2017, sweeps us into a world where death is not the end but a release into a realm of imperishable freedom. Or Moksha, if you will.
Crafted with the care of a jeweller working on a specially intricate piece, the director brings to life the most precious and vital truth about death. As he takes us, along with his two protagonists, on a journey to the holy city of death Varanasi, the film somewhere along its resplendent route to salvation, becomes a treatise on life as defined by the inevitability of death.
