Trijya Review | A Sensitive Meditation On The Slow Orbit Of Becoming

After its journey through festivals, gathering awards and strong critical attention, Trijya (‘The Radius’, 2019) comes full circle, arriving home with a limited theatrical release across Maharashtra. Director Akshay Indikar shapes the film as an existential audio-visual poetry composition that unfolds over one hour and forty minutes. At its centre lies a man still searching for his own measure of being, worn down by migration, routine labour and a fading ability to read meaning in the disorder around him. The film meditates on a life suspended between movement and stagnation, worn down by rote occupation and an inability to recognise his life’s purpose amidst multiple-dimensional chaos.

The opening scene of the film establishes its effervescent and luminous form, placing a man with his back turned to the camera against a wide and serene naturescape. We audibly feel the cooling textures of misted water and the birdsong as the man slowly fades into the scenery. Leading this immersive choir of sound and sight is Avdhut Kale, played by Abhay Mahajan. He arrives as a gentle, sensitive presence, the kind of man who seems capable of writing poems and staring at the moon for hours on end. Avdhut is solitary by nature; and by design, prefers it that way, even playing carrom with himself as he comically switches sides to continue the game.

In the film, he works as a journalist and as he claims, his job is “all about writing in thin air.” The respect he receives rarely extends beyond the job title, since money stays scarce. A poet caught inside a journalistic shell, the discipline and structure of the work begin to erode his inner life. The little agency he practises comes through offering strangers small forecasts of their fate in the horoscope column. He writes bursts of counsel such as, “You’re stuck somewhere, get out and explore the world” and in the same breath, “You’re wandering too much, stay in your lane.” While Avdhut speaks to a readership larger than himself, he is also, in many ways, addressing and doubting his own reflection.

For a film that treats silence as a language and a presence of its own, long stretches unfold through the sight of Avdhut walking alone against a city that never pauses. He moves through trains, crowded roads and factory corridors while the background churns with restless life. What stands out is the camera’s repeated choice to follow rather than confront him. He turns away from our gaze, his back always facing us and withholding complete emotional access. He chooses instead to merge with the world the film constructs around him. 

Trijya is not a fast-moving film. It asks for steady attention and earns it through a carefully built soundscape drawn from everyday foley textures. These sounds perform a kind of jugalbandi within the frame to become musically inclined, complementing the masterfully shot visuals. Mandar Kamlapurkar’s sound work builds a textured aural landscape that deepens feeling and adds a spectral charge, guiding the film’s mood till the end. The film unfolds across five chapters as Avdhut tries to read the shape of his own life. Does he want marriage? Does he want another profession? Does he forever want solitude? These are the questions he circles, yet beneath them runs a steady unease in a sensitive man disturbed by a world eager to claim authority over who he is. Stranded at a train station after drifting away, when a policeman asks who he is and where he wants to go, he admits he does not know and says the police can release him if they find his poems worthy.

The film’s form becomes a reflection of a poet’s interior state, suspended in emotional stasis without a muse. Though the film holds many moments of cinematic delight, the image that stays with me is sunlight carrying a sound, split open by a windmill turning through it. Avdhut’s relentless journey through shifting landscapes in search of harmony becomes a brave quest despite its nihilistic undertone. His core remains sealed and guarded, forcing him to seek an outer perimeter to steady the life he is still learning how to inhabit. Although he is deeply intuitive and emotionally intelligent. Indikar ensures his character dominates the screen through his wisdom and complex questions without saying much at all.

The film indulges in its pacing and in the all-consuming way the character frames his life as separate from a community he still wants to belong to. It excels at shaping the ever-moving atmosphere yet shows limited narrative momentum and the second half slows into repeated images of Avdhut drifting through spaces. Cinematography by Indikar and Swapnil Shete cradled the film gently by its chin, often replacing the need of speech and lending the film its poetic identity.

A soft-spoken girl in a sari stands alongside her parents for a formal marital introduction. Although he’s not really inclined. We see him instead in a casual encounter with a woman from his past (Aarya Rothe), closer to his wavering sense of self. Our protagonist stays forever-zoned out, attentive to what's happening in the background, to flowing water, wall paintings and other textures, way more than human faces.

The distance he keeps from his surroundings extends to his home as well. His sister points out that he has not met their relatives in a long time and how we see that he barely responds to the gentle questions his patient father asks him. What surrounds him appears less lived in and more observed, as though he’s witnessing a theatre of sound and sight rather than actually inhabiting it. The city opens up to him the same way he, as a journalist, maps strangers’ horoscopes from a distance, tracing their futures without ever meeting the people behind them.

With no disdain intended, a mellow character like him can usually feel tiring to watch on screen. Mahajan, however, lends the film a steady elegance, where his close-up frames and restrained, effective dialogue create moments that stay engaging and multifaceted. Although the world of Trijya never turns indifferent to the world around him, it moves alongside him, shaped by friends, colleagues, families and entire communities surviving across rural Maharashtra.

His old friend whom he spends an evening unwinding with and his other friends working at the factory become his rare circle of trust, one of the only places where he voices his anxieties about marriage and his uncertain working life. Through them, the film also maps the conditions of labourers who run machines through endless shifts, some even giving birth under harsh circumstances and still returning to work. At home, his family keeps struggling to remain afloat and supportive of him, yet their son stands unable to meet them halfway. Within this living network around him, he emerges as an outlier, a lone witness to motion everywhere, yet stranded in a space where belonging never arrives.

A man returns to the wild searching for answers across forests and marshes. He is guided by a cryptic figure (Gajanan Paranjpe) toward a sacred pocket near the waterfalls. There, he shuts his eyes and listens to the stream cut through stone as the land breathes around him. By its end, Trijya shapes itself into a study of inter-connectedness and what becomes of sensitive people cornered by the chaotic order of the world. A maladaptive way of facing the world pushes a person toward isolation and an eventual surrender to nature. He rarely understands himself yet senses that the consequences of his actions must stay hidden from others. Nature turns into his shelter as he tilts toward a restrained, almost saintly withdrawal from ordinary life. Such an outcome is rarely realistic in real life but makes perfect sense in the world of the film wherein the protagonist finally feels a certain semblance of self against the vast waters.