Sunrise (2014)

directed by Partho Sen-Gupta
India
85 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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Made with somewhat of a neo-noir feeling in mind, Sunrise is a mostly visual movie that has a very deliberate aesthetic to it, occasionally letting the plot fall by the wayside in favor of establishing atmosphere. It communicates itself less with dialogue and more with sidelong glances, knitted brows, looks of concern and uncertainty. It borrows heavily from older noir movies as well as the pool of commonly used generic mystery tropes; men chasing shadows, pouring, pounding rain, a main character repeatedly drawn to a seedy nightclub for reasons he's not aware of. When it's not nighttime everything is honey-colored and gorgeous. But when it is nighttime the rain comes and soaks everything to the bone. For this, India's streets and nightlife are turned into a labyrinth into which all that you love may disappear and be lost for good.

It's unusual in terms of narrative because it feels like the movie itself doesn't have a "voice" and it's very hard to explain what I mean by that. I think it's due in large part to the man who's supposed to be our main character hardly speaking ten words throughout the entire movie. Where other films might have a clear and confident way of presenting their story, this one just stays in the darkness and never reveals its full self. 

It's great at creating a feeling of overt danger and of people lurking in the night, and I very much enjoy detective movies that are more vague and eerie like this one is. But once or twice it kind of misfires and that shadowy feeling gets overblown. There's a recurring motif of the main character chasing after somebody who we can only see the shadowed silhouette of, and that's a pretty clever visual technique, but the shadow figure keeps striking these poses that are so outwardly aggressive they don't translate well and it just looks goofy. The detective is shooting at this hammy shadow person posing like somebody playing a game of charades where their phrase is "bad guy", and for a film that's otherwise so great at being subtle, those fight scenes come off as being out of place.

The shadow motif is really small potatoes in comparison to what this movie achieves as a whole, though. It's genuinely haunting and feels unsafe and at its heart is the looming threat of child trafficking. The detective in this film does have a personal connection to the case he's working, but his own personal deterioration takes place in the backseat while the actual crimes unfold and are committed. All throughout is the feeling of helplessness, of powerlessness- a parent's worst nightmare of losing a child and knowing they're trapped somewhere in the underbelly of the city.