Bollywood

PYRE: A PORTRAIT OF ABANDONMENT

by Arnab Banerjee November 3 2026, 12:00 am Estimated Reading Time: 4 mins, 25 secs

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Where the Mountains Stand Witness to Lives Left Behind: Arnab Banerjee examines Vinod Kapri’s Pyre, a moving portrait of an elderly Kumaoni couple confronting loneliness, migration and abandonment, where the Himalayan landscape becomes a silent witness to a vanishing rural world and forgotten lives.

Director: Vinod Kapri

Cast: Padam Singh, Hira Devi, Subhash Chandra Lakshman, Shubham Chaudhary, Sadab Khan Bishan

Cinematography: Manas Bhattacharyya

Rating: ★★★☆☆

Set in a picturesque yet increasingly desolate hamlet in Uttarakhand’s Kumaon region, Vinod Kapri’s Pyre is a quietly devastating meditation on old age, abandonment, loneliness and the inexorable erosion of rural life. The two-hour Hindi-language film centres on Tulsi (Hira Devi) and Padam (Padam Singh), an elderly goat-herding couple who have been married for over six decades. Their only son, Harish, migrated to Mumbai many years ago and has never returned. As their neighbours gradually desert their crumbling ancestral homes, the couple find themselves among the last remaining inhabitants of what is fast becoming a ghost village.

Life in a Vanishing Mountain Village

In this remote hilltop settlement, cloudbursts and landslides are hardly regarded as extraordinary occurrences. The rubble cascading down the mountainsides is routinely shovelled aside, makeshift repairs are undertaken, and life resumes its accustomed rhythm. Nature’s occasional assaults are absorbed with a remarkable, almost resigned equanimity. Until, that is, the deluge becomes too overwhelming to be contained by human endurance or ingenuity.

For Tulsi and Padam, existence has dwindled into an unvarying succession of days, punctuated by the demands of tending their goats, deteriorating health and the gnawing ache of isolation. Their circumstances are so bleak that they are even compelled to contemplate suicide. The village has emptied out to such an extent that the few remaining neighbours must be summoned by blowing a trumpet. The sound, carrying across the desolate mountainside, becomes an evocative reminder of a community on the verge of extinction.

The Existential Cost of Migration

There is, too, a poignant existential dimension to their predicament. Leaving one’s home and hearth is never merely a geographical departure; it entails a multitude of uncertainties. Will one ever return? And if one does, will the place retain its familiarity? Will those left behind still be there, and will we ourselves remain unchanged? The perennial, unsettling question of whether one can ever truly go home again hangs over the narrative, acquiring particular poignancy in the lives of those who have nowhere else to go.

Despite its decidedly downbeat premise and bare-bones narrative, Pyre is an absorbing and thought-provoking cinematic account of genteel poverty, familial estrangement and the indignities of growing old in an increasingly indifferent world. The absence of even rudimentary amenities, alongside the shuttered homes of families who have migrated to the plains and distant cities, quietly but unmistakably exposes the systemic neglect of remote mountain communities. Migration here is not simply an economic phenomenon; it is also a slow-motion social tragedy, leaving behind an ageing population deprived of companionship, support and the most elementary comforts.

Manas Bhattacharyya’s cinematography is particularly arresting. The locations are magnificently captured, with compositions that juxtapose the breathtaking splendour of the Himalayan landscape against the unforgiving realities of life within it. The mountains are at once magnificent and implacable, offering visual sublimity but little succour to those struggling to survive in their shadow. Kapri’s film derives much of its emotional force from this disquieting contrast, allowing the landscape, the silences and the couple’s everyday travails to speak with an eloquence that dialogue often cannot. Pyre ultimately lingers as an elegy for a vanishing way of life and for people whom the world seems to have quietly forgotten.

Extraordinary Naturalism in the Performances

The film’s greatest asset, however, lies in the extraordinary naturalism of its two lead performances, delivered by non-professional actors whose lived experiences seem to lend an almost documentary authenticity to their portrayals. Padam Singh, an 80-year-old former Army havildar and farmer, plays the ageing, bidi-smoking husband, negotiating the indignities of advancing years, profound isolation and the faint, long-deferred hope of a family reunion. Hira Devi, approximately 70, a local resident of the village, is equally affecting as Tulsi, the resilient, devoted wife whose quiet fortitude conceals the emotional toll of a life marked by deprivation and abandonment.

The circumstances of their discovery are almost as remarkable as the performances themselves. Kapri first encountered Padam Singh, who happens to be his father’s cousin, at a family gathering in 2022. When Singh jokingly challenged the filmmaker to put his acting abilities to the test, Kapri asked him to enact a scene. The result was so unexpectedly convincing that he was taken aback by Singh’s instinctive, unstudied performance.

He subsequently shared the audition footage with filmmaker friends, several of whom expressed admiration for the elderly man’s natural aptitude.

Hira Devi, meanwhile, was discovered quite serendipitously. While Kapri was making enquiries in the village about finding a woman to play the female protagonist, he noticed her walking past with an enormous bundle of firewood. Her unassuming presence and familiarity with the rhythms of mountain life made her an inspired choice.

Together, the two bring to Pyre an unvarnished emotional authenticity that would have been difficult to manufacture through conventional casting.