Mark Reviews Movies: WIDOW OF SILENCE

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | July 9, 2020

Writer/director Praveen Morchhale portrays a series of very real, overlapping purgatories in Widow of Silence. The setting is Kashmir, currently in the midst of a long-running conflict between India and Pakistan (with the involvement of China, too) for control of the region.

News reports of terrorist attacks and other violence are a daily occurrence. On a regular taxi ride from a small village into the city, a man half-jests that the driver should buy a radio, instead of playing this tape recording of miserable news every day.

It's a land of security checkpoints, where the same soldier asks the same taxi driver for his ID and vehicle registration every time he drives through it, and of overly complicated government bureaucracy. Aasiya (Shilpi Marwaha), the central character, is stuck in the middle of all of this. She has to take a trip in the same cab at least every other day into the city. There, she goes through the routine of meeting the same government official, who asks her the same questions and gives her the same answer.

Her husband was abducted by the Indian military seven years ago. Aasiya holds out hope that he's still alive, but she hasn't received any word as to his fate.

This happens with regularity in the region, and for four months, Aasiya has come to this office, looking to obtain a death certificate for her husband. He owned a third of an acre of land, and it can't be transferred to her unless there's an official government document stating that he is dead.

Morchhale's film is entirely about routines and how they, along with accepted abuses of power within a religious and patriarchal society, lead to an escalating degree of hopelessness. Aasiya's life can't move forward, even though she's finally ready to try, because of the absence of a piece of paper. The registrar (played by Ajay Chourey) is willing to cut some corners—but only if she joins him in a hotel room.

The film lives with this character through the repetition, the now-commonplace despair, and the increasing hostility from the official. Morchhale allows the realism of this scenario, in its small and more pertinent details, to speak volumes about life in this place and for its inhabitants. Ultimately, Widow of Silence arrives at a climax of ingenious situational irony that attacks the problem on a personal and systematic level.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products