October

7.6/10
Romance
2018
1h 55m
PG

an acclaimed Indian romantic drama directed by Shoojit Sircar, starring Varun Dhawan and Banita Sandhu. The film follows a spirited young man whose life transforms when the woman he loves falls into a coma, and his steadfast devotion becomes a poetic meditation on love, loss, presence, and hope.

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Romance

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October (2018) begins in the soft, amber glow of dawn at the lush campus of Chaudhary College, where the world feels newly possible and untested. Dan, a young man brimming with the careless confidence of youth, navigates life with an ease that comes from never having been truly tested by pain or loss. His laughter echoes through corridors, his mornings start with coffee in the hands of friends who feel as permanent as the sky above them, and his future stretches before him like a highway bathed in morning light. From the first moment we meet him, Dan feels familiar — not as an extraordinary hero, but as someone you once were: carefree, late to class, excited by small wonders and big possibilities. Around him swirl the characters who make up his circle. His friends tease him, they make plans that go nowhere, and they revel in the insignificance of youth that still feels sacred. But the film carries a quiet undercurrent, a sense that life’s tides are about to turn and that the bright morning will give way to an autumn of the heart.

And then Shiuli enters his life — she is gentle, composed, attentive, a quiet observance in a world that usually shouts. Shiuli is not spectacularly beautiful; there are no fireworks in her introduction. Instead, there is a stillness that plants itself in the middle of Dan’s outstretched routines and begins to take root. Their encounters are not grand; they are gestures, pauses, unremarkable exchanges that feel extraordinary in hindsight. When Dan is assigned a group report with Shiuli, there is a subtle shift — not obvious, not dramatic, but felt like the first drop of rain after a long dry summer. She smiles when he speaks, she listens without interruption, and in those small acts, the audience begins to understand that this is no ordinary college friendship. Dan’s affection for Shiuli grows like the bloom of a flower that didn’t know it had seeds — gradual, organic, almost unconscious.

The early sequences of October are rich with imagery that captures the everyday beauty of life: the humming of bikes along narrow streets, the warm light through classroom windows, the scent of rain on pavement, and the laughter of students unburdened by consequence. But when tragedy strikes — a terrible accident that leaves Shiuli in a coma — the film changes direction in both tone and purpose. The vibrant world of youth, once so full of light, dissolves into a landscape defined by waiting rooms, hospital corridors, and the dull ache of worry. Dan, who once carried the easy laughter of someone untouched by real grief, now carries hope like a fragile flame in his hands. He stays beside Shiuli’s bed, day after day, his posture both fierce and frail. In the quiet hum of machines, in the slow pulse of monitors, Dan begins to understand that love is neither simple nor fleeting. It is quiet endurance.

Director Shoojit Sircar does not rush this transformation. Each day with Shiuli becomes a study in patience, in the way time bends when you watch someone you care about breathe. Dan begins to notice details he never would have noticed before — the small rise and fall of Shiuli’s chest, the way morning light lands on her hair, the shadow in her eyelids that never fully lifts. The camera privileges these moments, lingering longer than expected, allowing the audience to feel the weight of them as Dan does. The soundtrack, composed by Shantanu Moitra, becomes the emotional language of the film — soft piano chords underlie Dan’s silent vigils, muted orchestral swells follow his walks through rain-washed streets, and the absence of music in certain scenes echoes the nothingness that grief can create.

As Dan’s life shrinks into the space around Shiuli’s hospital bed, his friends drift away, not out of abandonment but out of the natural distance that forms when one life pauses and others continue. They check in, they offer smiles, but they cannot inhabit the stillness he inhabits. Dan’s family watches from the perimeter of his devotion, unsure whether to push him toward rest or honor his vigil. On the outside, time flows forward; on the inside, it feels stopped. In this way, October captures a truth too seldom spoken: that sometimes the world moves on while we learn to stay in one place long enough to feel the full force of love.

The film’s visuals contrast the bustling life outside with the fading life inside. College corridors teem with students arguing over tests and lunch; city buses clatter toward destinations unseen; the rain falls, relentless and cleansing. Outside, the world spins with commitments and obligations; inside, Dan watches as Shiuli’s condition remains stuck in the limbo between here and not here. In one haunting sequence, Dan ventures out into the city to retrieve Shiuli’s umbrella left under a café table, and the streets seem too bright, too loud, too alive for a man living amid silence. When Dan answers his phone and hears the laughter of friends, he feels an echo of the life he used to lead — a life that now feels both distant and impossible to reclaim.

And yet, love in October is not a plea for resolution; it is a revelation of presence. Dan doesn’t ask Shiuli to wake; he simply sits beside her, as though his presence might be the anchor that keeps her tethered to life’s thin thread. Shoojit Sircar’s camera captures Dan’s stillness: his head resting on his hand, his eyes soft with worry, his body resisting the urge to flee from pain. He carries flowers he leaves untouched in a vase; he leaves notes he never mails; he returns to Shiuli’s room every morning with the same hope, unaltered by disappointment. In Dan’s devotion, the film finds a quiet splendor — not dramatic, not loud, not designed for applause, but true.

A turning point comes when Shiuli’s vitals flicker as though she is waking from a dream she cannot remember. Dan, who has learned to breathe with restraint and to hope without expectation, holds her hand and whispers her name like a prayer. In this moment, the film approaches its deepest emotional crux: love is not only felt in presence but in longing. Whether Shiuli truly awakens or not becomes secondary to the fact that Dan, and the audience with him, has crossed into a territory where time bends and hearts split between what was and what might still be. The tension here isn’t derived from melodrama; it is generated by pure emotional truth. The camera stays close to Dan’s face, catching the minute shifts of expression — the tick of fear, the hint of sadness, the brief flare of hope — like watching the sky change during an eclipse.

When Shiuli finally opens her eyes — not with fanfare but with the soft exhalation of someone taking in the air after a long dream — the world feels both familiar and alien. Dan, who has inhabited a world of stillness and waiting, now faces the uncharted territory of what comes next. Shiuli’s recovery is not a fairy-tale restoration; it is an awakening into a world they both left standing. The city around them is still busy, still humming with life like a machine uninterested in human tenderness. But Dan and Shiuli now share a private geography: the memory of waiting, of love that remained steady in silence, of the truth that love does not require sound to be real.

The final scenes are quiet, contemplative, almost reverential. Dan and Shiuli walk through the college campus — the trees rustling in autumn’s early breath, fallen leaves turning underfoot, light soft as hope reborn. They do not speak of the time lost; there is no need. Their eyes, their steps, even the silence between them form a language of renewal. October does not promise forever, nor does it wrap its conclusion in neat lines; it offers instead a moment of clarity: that life’s grace is found not in endings but in the willingness to remain present amid pain and wonder. When the final shot fades to soft white — like light filtered through memory — it feels not like an ending but like breath itself: quiet, essential, ongoing.

In its lush narrative, October (2018) becomes far more than a romantic drama. It is a meditation on devotion, a theological exploration of presence, and a poetic statement about what it means to stand in the gap between loss and love. The film’s cinematography, by Avik Mukhopadhyay, turns ordinary planes of light into symphonies of emotion; its direction, by Shoojit Sircar, uses stillness as dramatic force; its performances, led by Varun Dhawan and Banita Sandhu, embody a love that is both fragile and unbreakable. The rain that falls across the city becomes a character unto itself — cleansing, mourning, forgiving, renewing. And in this story of waiting and awakening, of youth transformed by care, October holds a mirror to the audience’s own memories of love, loss, and the quiet wonder of being truly present for another soul.