Abhishek Bachchan-starrer I Want To Talk is Shoojit Sircar’s heaviest and most daring work yet

But the lingering question is: why would Sircar, a filmmaker known for breaking boundaries, choose to tell such a generic tale? He has always pushed the envelope, not followed it. But that expectation is precisely the trap he sets. Predictability is a facade. A deliberate setup. This film is revolutionary because it doesn’t just reject the formula — it reimagines it from the ground up. It’s only in the final moments that you realise Sircar has been deconstructing the very tropes of underdog and terminal illness dramas, genres that have become stale from overuse. He isn’t just critiquing these stories; he’s using them to take you on a cinematic ride that is his most daring, most unorthodox, and perhaps his heaviest work yet. He demonstrates what a truly visionary filmmaker can accomplish by breathing new life into a genre long thought exhausted.

From the outset, Shoojit Sircar, alongside screenwriter Ritesh Shah, crafts the character of Arjun in a way that defies the usual attempts to draw easy sympathy. When Arjun learns of his life-threatening diagnosis, he sheds tears for a few days and then moves forward, determined to live whatever remains of his life without burdening others. He confides only in a close friend, concealing the news from his daughter and parents. He faces the ordeal largely alone, making solitary trips to the hospital, driving back in pain after surgeries, but refusing to make a spectacle of his suffering. In the hands of another filmmaker, Arjun could have easily become a tragic figure, with the film centering on his slow march towards death. But Sircar makes his intentions clear, much like Arjun himself: this is not a story about dying but about the desperation to live, no matter the odds.

Sircar doesn’t confine himself to a single tone or narrative style. Just as Arjun’s body morphs with each surgery, shedding cancerous cells and losing vital organs — the film itself transforms every fifteen minutes, shifting shape and spirit. It’s at once a father-daughter drama (a reverse Aftersun), an absurd medical thriller, and a tale of a man chasing the American Dream. You might expect the story to unfold with a deliberate slowness — and it does. But look closer, and you’ll find it’s racing ahead without ever drawing attention to its speed. Arjun’s transformation happens almost visibly yet imperceptibly. Weeks, months, and years slip by without you even noticing. The passage of time remains elusive until his daughter suddenly appears as a teenager, an economical leap that only becomes clear in hindsight. Sircar’s mastery lies in his restraint, his refusal to make a show of the film’s craft — just as Arjun refuses to make a misery out of his suffering.

For much of the film, you’re adrift: uncertain of where the story is headed. And even at the end, it seems to never truly arrive anywhere. This deliberate sense of uncertainty is mirrored in the film’s visual language. Sircar, whose previous work (Sardar Udham) was a visual dream, and who’s always collaborated with a super DOP (Avik Mukhopadhyay), chooses here a starkly unadorned aesthetic. The shots defy conventional rules of framing, feeling almost one-dimensional and emotionally distant. Even the locations remain unutilized, a contrast to Sircar’s past films, where cities like Delhi, Kolkata, and Lucknow were full of pointed observations. But this too is part of the design. Sircar deliberately opts for a dry, meandering approach, daring the audience to engage with a story where emotions aren’t handed to them on a platter, but rather left to unfold quietly, without force.

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Perhaps the only shot that truly captures the collaboration between Sircar and Mukhopadhyay comes at a crucial moment: Arjun, observing his daughter Reya (a masterfully restrained Pearle Dey) from a distance, caught in an intense argument with her mother for not revealing her father’s battle with death. It’s the heart of the film — unspoken, but loaded with meaning. Arjun watches them through a reflection in the mirror, a long take that speaks volumes about his life. In this still frame, we feel the weight of his burden: the pain of being a separated parent, the quiet sacrifice of a father who never wanted to add to his daughter’s pain, and, for the first time, the bittersweet realisation of his daughter’s love and care for him. Similarly, a dynamic that breathes much-needed life into the film is the relationship between Arjun and his surgeon, Dr Deb (a terrific Jayant Kripalani). Through this connection, Sircar not only abandons the traditional formula of overt emotional cues but also introduces an unexpected, almost absurd sense of humour. It’s a massive leap in a genre often rooted in sentimentality.

The film begins with a lengthy voiceover from Arjun, throwing phrases like: “I hate the word manipulative… screw the story… people are dumb… marketing is bullshit… what even is average?” These are more than just words used by Arjun to describe himself. As they’re also Sircar’s manifesto: a declaration right in the film’s opening moments that this will be no ordinary film. Sircar, like Arjun, despises manipulation, the kind of stories that coax audiences into feeling what they are supposed to feel. So, at one point, Arjun confesses, “Pain is a promise that life always keeps.” It’s a line that rings true. Not just for his life, but for the entire genre — where pain is the currency, the inevitable focus. But Sircar defies this convention. He takes that promise of pain and quietly sets it aside, choosing instead to focus on life in all its messy, unglamorous authenticity. After all, the film is less about the burden of suffering and more about the beauty of survival. A silent rebellion against the formulaic expectation that the story must manipulate us into feeling.