Mithya Review: Sumanth Bhat’s debut looks through a child’s scars, fluidly shifting between immersion and distance

Contemporary Indian cinema has rarely probed into the marrow of grief in childhood, its hovering loneliness, as vividly, internally as the Kannada film, Mithya achieves. Writer-director Sumanth Bhat takes a delicate, piercing look inside the psyche of the eleven-year-old Mithun (Athish Shetty), or ‘Mithya’, in the shadow of recent orphanhood. Early stabs of details into what led to their deaths are spare, doled out only in little chunks over the course of the narrative, though the emphasis is more on effects than unravelling the cause.

The immediate establishing marker of Mithun is his defiance, encased in a visual of rejection. Mithun’s aunt Jyothi (Roopa Varkady, subtly effective in mapping out a whole arc with few words) and her husband Surya (Prakash Thuminad) take up the guardianship of him and his much younger sister, Vandana. Along with shattering loss, Mithun experiences disorienting displacement-from his private elite English-medium education in Mumbai to Udupi, shifting from Marathi to Kannada – adapting to a new place, tentatively stepping into new friendships. There’s so much change on top of accumulated trauma he contends with; Mithya approaches it searchingly, but never with intrusion.

While Surya is instantly loving, swooping up Mithun as his own child, Jyothi gradually leans into her expanded family, its set of new demands. You almost suspect something ulterior to the uncle’s immense, unstinting affection for Mithun, and Bhat builds this with poignantly expressive, slow-burning nuance. The screenplay peppers in the odd, measured bit of confession to evoke an entire backstory; suddenly, a character’s actions emerge lit clearly.

Mithya’s power lies in how Bhat draws us closer, deeper into the boy’s inner world. Children are more watchful and absorbing of their surroundings than adults would like to admit to themselves. Even as his uncle and aunt try to ease his quiet, emotionally withheld mourning, giving space and never forcing their presence, there’s only so much they can shelter Mithun from. It’s a journey the boy has to make on his own terms, negotiating the messy, brittle tangle of ugly feelings, unresolved questions that demand to be confronted. But in the wrestling, Bhat doesn’t place much importance on the exact shape and nature of answers, the truth is only skirted, scraps of it tossed around while the focus stays unmoving on Mithun’s private understanding of grief, the anchor he must form through loss, its attending turmoil. Bhat doesn’t create so much of scenes as he scrapes together fragments.

You’re nudged not just to empathize but learn to see the world through his lens, reserves of trauma he holds within as well as vast, hurtling vortex of resentment, confusion and abandonment he nurses. Bhat executes a complete, sensorially fractured plunge. Mithun is angry, hurting, thrown off into the emotional deep end but remains wary, guarded in spilling his feelings, sharing them with his new family. Bhat gives time to his protagonist, letting him open up at his own pace without imposing a ruthless urgency on the scenes. Instead, they tremble with uncertainty, seeming to hang off a precipice the way it registers to Mithun. Any moment the love and assurance coming his way, he feels, might be snatched away again. He keeps himself tightly shielded from the outer world, while the film slowly hints and teases out all that he corks within.

Cinematographer Udit Khurana accentuates Mithun’s isolating impulses with remarkable framing that’s always gesturing to where the boy is mentally, emotionally within spaces both encroaching, like his father’s family baying for his custody, and rolling, natural spaces. Yet, the camera never strays from constantly scanning his face; Athish Shetty’s tremendous performance see-saws between both locking you into what Mithun feels at a particular moment, and shutting out completely. Mithya rests on Shetty; his is an incredibly emotionally intelligent performance, quiet, twitchy and flailing, exerting into willed withdrawal and tormented by bitterness. The heart of the film blooms in the dynamic between Mithun and his uncle, a marvelous, moving Thuminad.

Mithun is caught between two families trying to claim him, the clawing of one provoking the other into going combative. In this tussle for his guardianship, he doesn’t participate; he recedes, but cannot shake off a nagging loathing for his sister who he believes is why the relationship between his parents soured. It leads to a wrenching finale, full of lashing and churn, the battered heart gradually ceding way to a shard of reconciliation, acceptance. In Mithya, Sumanth Bhat has crafted a seething mood-piece, a prickly portrait of healing angling with granular intensity into its protagonist’s rippling world.