Birds in the Dark is written, directed and shot by Shashank Walia, the cinematographer of Gurvinder Singh’s brooding Punjabi drama, Rehmat. It has a distinct look. The visual aesthetic is what one might call ‘indie-core’. It’s a black-and-white film; there’s a conscious stillness — an inertia almost — to the acting and framing; whispery voice-overs dot passing environments; some scenes are long, wide and unbroken; activity is implied by sound design; deadpan close-ups are followed by master shots to ‘reveal’ people in their setting; images of everyday life melt into each other. In most cases, this style may come across as pretentious, showy or deliberately distant.
But the identity of Walia’s elaborately crafted film is linked to the language of reclamation. It’s not a style here so much as a slow-burning portrait of invisibilised stories recouping the independence — and the tenor — of their telling. There’s a constant push and pull between the cinema of erasure and the culture of being; between how each character perceives themselves and the dignity the movie offers them.
Birds in The Dark is disguised as a homecoming drama, one where existing itself is a form of persecution. It takes time for the linearity of the premise to emerge: A Punjabi police informer, Jagtar, returns to his village. His family is in debt like many others. This secretly gay man falls back into a familiar routine: an interclass affair with a rich land-owner; and catch-ups with his childhood friend Dilraj, a divorced Dalit woman whose activism for her landless community is beginning to yield fruit.
The village is teeming with microaggressions: her alcoholic brother gets thrashed at a wedding he serves in, her best friend is raped in the fields, and the locals are so oppressed by upper-caste heirs that they find tranquility in the trauma. A light-eyed Kashmiri man named Amir whom Jagtar failed to detain — a stretch the film opens with — arrives in search of Jagtar, the captor he shared some romantic tension with. The fates of Amir, Dilraj and Jagtar collide in a hopeless place. All three primary characters are marginalised, but it’s fittingly the Dalit woman whose courage triggers their catharsis.
The remarkable thing about the film is that its minimalist style reflects the calm before the storm that usually defines such stories. Each of them has their own pain and resentments brewing within, yet they belong to an India whose protests are largely silent. The film opens with Jagtar dragging a handcuffed Amir through the jungle — it’s the end of a survival thriller, perhaps, that wasn’t essential to see. The two hostile men are trying to find their way back to civilisation, but from another lens, they look like an eloped couple seeking refuge in nature, away from the society that might have stigmatised their ‘betrayal’ to masculinity. The forest could be Jagtar’s village or even Amir’s paradise that’s been soiled by the illusion of development and the stress of communal politics; he, too, like Jagtar and Dilraj, is a landless resident of nowhere. Another bird in the dark. That the narrative comes full circle is a testament to its sense of lyricism — each of them evolves to play a supporting role in the others’ life.
The performances reframe repression as a reality rather than a condition. The three leads have faces made for film. Harwinder Singh Aujila’s Jagtar would’ve been the protagonist of most films, given that he returns to his ancestral home as an act of retreat. The way he recedes into the background supplies the baton-passing nature of the narrative. Shahnawaz Bhat’s Amir sounds almost too refined for the rugged conflict, but it’s this Urdu-coded tenderness that also grounds the film. Mauli Singh’s Dilraj conveys the toll of surviving a difficult history without spelling it out. There’s a lifetime of detachment and dissent etched across her gait, even as she plays tic-tac-toe outside a Gurudwara while the rest of the women offer prayers and clutch onto faith. It’s never her story, but she silently yanks the film into her space, letting the men liberate themselves in her slipstream.
When the film zooms out towards the end, you see how an unshackling can be both intimate and public: a man standing on a bridge, or a woman mobilising other voices. It all comes together like muted colours flowing in the direction of water. The ‘artistic indulgence’ be off-putting for minds conditioned to the volume of mainstream entertainment, but there’s a method to (most of) it. Much of the violence — a wild boar being hunted; a server being beaten up; a pregnant woman being assaulted; the audacity to love and rebel — occurs off-screen, as if the camera isn’t allowed to officialise or ‘capture’ these incidents. You hear the suffering without seeing it. You hear the complicity without recognising it.
It’s a smart budget-filmmaking device, of course, but there are times when even casual exchanges and conversations happen off-screen. The voices of the three linger on, as the camera drifts away into their meditative surroundings, refusing to stay with them. It’s a creative choice, but also a political one. It’s as if the queer men and the Dalit woman must reclaim more than just their agency; they must ‘earn’ the gaze of those who keep reducing them to labels and headlines. Their legitimacy is forever bound to the pressure to stand up for a cause and prove themselves. In other words, they cannot live if they do not fight. Sometimes, as Birds in the Dark suggests, it’s as simple as being able to speak — and be heard — while the lens is on them. It’s as simple as knowing that the onus is on nobody else. It’s as quiet as being seen for who they are, what they desire, and how they resist.