‘Duet’ Short Film Review: A Sensory Portrait of Guilt, Grief and the Music Within

I have a soft spot for stories that grapple with unfilmable feelings. More so in India, where the very culture of cinema and mainstream entertainment stem from the inherent pressure to escape these feelings. Sheetal Menon’s Duet, a 39-minute short, takes on this culture in some ways. It’s a film that centers difficult emotions by being about a character who cannot escape them. It’s set during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic (remember those days?); the protagonist, Mihir (Sidhant Gupta), is a pianist crippled by the grief of losing his brother and the guilt of being estranged before his death. Isolated by the lockdown, the man has no choice but to struggle alone and get lost in his own head — through dreams and hallucinations, sensory moments and everyday triggers, memories and regrets.

The title refers to the nature of art that usually springs out of suffering. In Mihir’s case, the art is music: a composition that becomes the only medium of conversation with his late brother. Mihir is so consumed by the shame of not speaking to his brother for years that he seeks refuge in the only language he knows. This is not an easy thing to translate on screen, of course. It is admittedly not easy to watch either. There are times when Duet leans too much into the ‘experience’ and immersiveness of it all: a common problem with stories that try to overcompensate for having intangible subjects. Not least when sounds and visuals play key roles in the metamorphosis of a reclusive protagonist. The shots are striking, as is the sound design, conveying a psychological trek with no summit to reach. But there’s the risk of pain becoming more of an aesthetic.

The stillness and disorienting mindscape work in theory. It reminded me a bit of Andrew Haigh’s haunting All Of Us Strangers (2023), a film about a lonely screenwriter in a high-rise whose notions of fiction and reality blend into each other. Mihir, too, summons the trauma of a tough childhood — particularly his mother’s tragic death — to camouflage the urgent void of losing his sibling. He internalises the presence of his brother from those days, trapped between incomplete exchanges and anecdotes. There’s also a track of a neighbour, whose brief knock on his door becomes a reminder of the main-character energy of grief. Those like Mihir can’t imagine that their lives are tethered to their immediate surroundings; they can’t fathom a parallel world in which they touch the lives (and deaths) of strangers.

Another way to process this film is to see it as the humanisation — or the deconstruction — of a popular narrative trope. In a parallel universe, it’s the behind-the-scenes video of a classic track: the private flashbacks of a musician when he’s asked in the future about what he went through to achieve greatness. We know of the tortured-artist syndrome, but Duet delves into the anatomy of it: Is it as simple as pouring oneself into one’s craft? How does ‘bleeding for art’ really look? What lies in between loss and catharsis? To its credit, the film deals with the most uncomfortable parts of a journey that has often been reduced to a romantic cliche.

It’s also a spiritual sequel to Menon’s first short film, Siblings (2019), about two adult sisters who are united by their struggle to keep their comatose father alive. Unlike the women of Siblings, it’s tempting to wonder if Mihir and his brother might have drifted apart in a similar situation: led by fractured male egos and the whim to take for granted the permanence of blood bonds. It’s almost as if Mihir’s adverse reaction reclaims the individualism of dying from the clutches of a pandemic that has normalised the dread of bereavement. He’s putting himself through the wringer to validate the loss of his brother at a time when loss itself is facing an identity crisis.

The thing about Sidhant Gupta is that he’s cursed with the good-looks paradox. It’s harder for him to achieve anonymity in roles, so he often acts more to offset the ‘disadvantage’. But I like that, despite this impression, he’s more preoccupied by the craft than the consequences (fame and stardom) of it. He challenges himself, and you can sense the intensity of what he does. He’s figured out how to play characters with big personalities — Jawaharlal Nehru (Freedom at Midnight), Charles Sobhraj (Black Warrant), a hungry Partition-era director (Jubilee) — in order to legitimise the visibility of his performances. His Mihir is an extension of this; you can see his acting, but he reframes it as a strength through the physicality of the person. It’s a bit like watching a man torn between the violin-coded nakedness of his emotions and his piano-coded perception of them through the art he creates. Watch him long enough, and grief becomes a solo riff in search of the duet it once was.