As the Hindi film industry continues to recalibrate in the aftermath of the pandemic, filmmaker-actor Rajat Kapoor is candid about a growing concern: the space for small, character-driven films is shrinking, and fast.
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter India ahead of the streaming release of Everybody Loves Sohrab Handa, Kapoor points to an ecosystem increasingly governed by data and prediction models. “The algorithm situation makes people think they know what will work — but that’s not how films are made,” he says, adding, with a note of dry scepticism, that those who claim to have cracked the system “aren’t exactly delivering consistent successes either.”
The whodunnit, which premiered at the MAMI Mumbai Film Festival in 2023, has come at a time when the industry’s middle ground appears to be eroding. While spectacle-driven films dominate theatrical screens, and streaming platforms grow more data-led in their commissioning, projects like Kapoor’s that are modest in scale but ambitious in character are caught in between.
“I don’t know if ‘worry’ is the word,” Kapoor says of the changing landscape. “But it’s definitely becoming harder to make films every year.”
Yet, for all his realism, Kapoor resists outright pessimism. “In a way, this is an age-old story,” he reflects. “Technology claims it can predict everything, but the human truth is that machines don’t know everything. That itself is a narrative. So I’m optimistic. I think it’s a phase. You have to be otherwise you can’t do anything.”
If the industry is tilting toward speed and scale, Everybody Loves Sohrab Handa moves in the opposite direction. The film, featuring an ensemble that includes Vinay Pathak, Ranvir Shorey, Waluscha De Sousa, Saurabh Shukla, Koel Purie, Sadia Siddiqui, and Chandrachoor Rai, uses the scaffolding of a murder mystery to explore something more intimate.
“My idea was to make a whodunit as a genre,” Kapoor explains. “I sat down during COVID and tried to plot something. After about six days, I found a twist and then I got excited. Because thematically, it fits with the kind of films I like to make.”
But the intrigue, he insists, is only the entry point. “Then it became a matter of who are these people, and how great can they be? For me, they are really beautiful people. Some are overbearing, but essentially warm.”
Kapoor’s gaze lingers not on the mechanics of the crime but on the contradictions of his characters. “Each one of them has needs, desires, aspirations. They work towards them, which makes them sometimes grey. That’s what makes people interesting, everybody is a little grey.”
In that sense, the film is a rebuttal to an industry leaning toward binaries: hits and flops, spectacle and silence, data and instinct. Kapoor’s cinema continues to occupy the messier middle.
Presented by Sameer Nair, Deepak Sehgal, and Kapoor himself, Everybody Loves Sohrab Handa will be available to stream on ZEE5.
