A Knock on the Door

As they prepare to celebrate their wedding anniversary, politically committed professors Hari and Ramona receive a group of unwanted visitors claiming to be from a central intelligence agency. Dressed in white hazmat suits and wearing multifaced masks, the team of men and women raids their house, traumatising the couple and taking away their hard drives. The professors contact the police, but when their friends and acquaintances doubt their claims, Hari begins to break down.

Seasoned cinematographer Ranjan Palit's Kafkaesque psychological thriller A Knock on the Door deals with the persecution of academics and activists critical of the regime, but it weaves a playful, genre-bending fiction around this kernel inspired by real events. Deliciously stylised, the film presents veteran actors – many of Palit's earlier collaborators – delivering brash, theatrical dialogue in off-kilter line readings: truncated, overlapping, restarting, with idiosyncratic breaks and extended pauses.

Combined with a grimy, low-light digital cinematography, these refreshing deviations from convention allow reality to seep through the cracks of fiction, lending the film a texture and rhythm recalling the late-career work of Werner Herzog and David Lynch. A Knock on the Door is a film about curtailed freedom, but in its deliberate imperfections and rejection of glossy finish, it offers something much more precious: a free film.

– Srikanth Srinivasan