THR India's 25 in 25: How 'Piku' Captured Both Motion and Emotion

A decade on, Piku remains a masterclass in capturing the textures of everyday life, a film that feels less scripted and more observed, a world in which chaos, humour, and affection coexist with tension. At its heart is the Banerjee household, a Delhi bungalow brimming with decades of accumulated habits, arguments, and memories, a home where the weight of parenthood and filial duty is felt in every gesture and glance. Piku (Deepika Padukone) carries the accumulated labour of her own adulthood alongside the unending demands of her hypochondriac father, Bhaskor (Amitabh Bachchan), whose need for control is disguised as care, and whose aversion to her marriage underscores the transactional rhythm of their relationship. 

The film’s road trip to Kolkata becomes more than a narrative device; it is a corridor through which past and present, memory and anticipation, fold over one another. Every interaction, every minor irritant, is infused with the history of a family navigating obligations, compromise, and love that is imperfect and stubbornly human. Rana (Irrfan Khan) enters as both outsider and witness, a foil who illuminates the pressures and compromises that shape Piku’s life, highlighting the tensions between independence and familial duty, empathy and frustration. 

Sircar and Chaturvedi’s storytelling is radical in its telling: the camera doesn’t dramatise, it unpeels with patience; dialogue overlaps, conversations cut each other off, and the domestic cacophony becomes a vessel for authenticity. In depicting these small, chaotic truths, Piku transforms the mundane into something universal. The film endures because it resonates across time, allowing audiences to inhabit the messy, loving, constrained, and resilient spaces of a family that is entirely recognisable yet singular in its specificity. Piku is not just a portrait of a father and daughter, but a chronicle of the lived experience of love, duty, and the passage of time, earning its place among the best Indian films of the past 25 years.

Shoojit Sircar on Making Piku

Director Sircar still remembers the stretch of highway where Piku truly came alive, a 25-to-50-kilometre strip of road where a car full of actors became both characters and companions, stuck together in every sense.  

Padukone, Irrfan , Bachchan and the house help Bodhan were rigged inside, unable to leave until the cameras were pulled apart, and it was in those moments, when the formal rehearsal was over but the tracking vehicle still had kilometres to cover before it could turn back, that the film found its unexpected rhythm. “I would tell them we have at least another 15 kilometres to go, so let’s keep trying the scene,” Sircar says. “And they would just do it for fun’s sake. Sometimes they would say, ‘Don’t keep this, we’re just doing it for ourselves.’ But out of that, magical moments came, like when Rana shouts at Bhaskor and Deepika’s reaction feels so organic. That came because they were stuck — in the car, in life, in character.”  

If the making of the film was full of such intimacy, the reception has been equally personal. Sircar says that even a decade later, the film keeps returning to him through strangers’ stories. “Young girls who were 15 then come to me now at 25 and say they still resonate with it. Someone messaged me that she was 12 when she first saw it and now, she’s a writer, still watching it. Even in an aircraft, an air hostess once told me she had a Bhaskor Banerjee at home — her mother — and the relationship was exactly the same.”  

The film, he believes, became something people could see themselves in, not as a work to admire from a distance but as a mirror to hold close. 

As a filmmaker, the lesson he carried forward was the courage to leave certain relationships undefined. He resisted calls for a conclusive ending between Piku and Rana, insisting instead that some bonds do not need labels, and the openness of interpretation became one of the film’s greatest strengths. Asked about its legacy, Sircar says, “Maybe Piku is my Sholay. Everyone has one film that is theirs. Possibly this is mine.”