Ei Raat Tomar Amar is a devastating treatise on marriage and mortality

Actor-turned-director Parambrata Chatterjee's thirteenth directorial venture is not an easy watch. It is verbose (so either you are fluent in Bengali or a fast reader), deeply tragic and unabashedly resilient in its quest for the essence of life within the marital domain.

- SUBHASH K JHA

When we first meet Amar Gupta (Anjan Dutta), he is seen taking his ailing wife Joyita (Aparna Sen) home after a session of chemotherapy with his sullen son, Joy (Parambrata Chatterjee) and Joy's wife. To say the tension in the car is palpable would be an understatement.

Parambrata Chatterjee builds on the mounting tension to a nerve-wracking degree. There are no pockets of relief in the storytelling, no smile breaks, no humorous interludes. Throbbing with tension and forebodings of impending mortality, Ei Raat Tomar Amar is a relentlessly grim tale of a marriage being rocked by piercing questioning on its fiftieth anniversary.

Amar and Joyita seem to have shared a blissful marital togetherness for fifty years. They have reached a stage in their lives when the status quo cannot be tampered with, not without calamitous results.