Film

Koshish

Name: Koshish
Genre: Drama
Released: 1972
Cast: Sanjeev Kumar, Jaya Bachchan, Asrani, Seema Deo, Om Shivpuri

A 1972 Indian drama about a deaf-mute couple navigating twenty years of marriage, parenthood, and social prejudice. Sanjeev Kumar and Jaya Bachchan anchor a film that refuses sentiment in favour of fierce ordinariness—these are people solving practical problems, arguing, laughing, building a life. It's patient and deeply moving without ever asking for your pity.

Should you watch it?

Watch it if you want a quiet, unshowy love story told mostly through gesture and small domestic moments, where the silence itself carries the emotion and the film trusts you to lean in.

Skip it if you need brisk plotting or a steady supply of incident, since it moves at a patient, meandering pace and leans on melodramatic swells that can feel dated.

What it asks of you: Settle in for roughly two hours and a quarter, with long unhurried stretches where little is said aloud, so patience matters more than plot tension.

Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.

If you liked this

The Bélier Family2014

A French comedy about deaf parents and their hearing daughter that moves between genuinely funny family chaos and real tenderness. It finds the humour in miscommunication without punching down, and builds to something sincere.

But It's lighter and breezier than Koshish—if you want serious, this feels like a palate cleanser rather than a companion piece.

My Left Foot: The Story of Christy Brown1989

Daniel Day-Lewis as Christy Brown, an Irish painter with cerebral palsy who refuses to be diminished by it or by anyone else's expectations. Gruff, alive, sexual, difficult. A person, not a condition.

But It's very focused on one man's perspective rather than a relationship. The biographical structure means you know where it's going.

My Left Foot: The Story of Christy Brown poster

In the Mood for Love2000

Wong Kar-wai's film about two neighbours who discover their spouses are having an affair, and the tentative, yearning romance that blooms between them instead. Visual poetry about restraint, longing, and the life you build in small gestures.

But The pacing is glacial and the colour palette might feel mannered. If you want plot momentum, this isn't it.

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from Koshish

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Sound City2013

Where Koshish explores what communication means without speech, Sound City explores what it means to speak through pure sound—how meaning lives in what's beneath words, in the grain and body of a voice or instrument.

Dave Grohl's documentary about a legendary Los Angeles recording studio, but it's really about how sound itself—texture, resonance, the physical fact of recording—shapes human connection. Made for people who think feeling lives in frequencies.

But It's oblique about its own subject and sometimes feels more like a love letter than an argument. Rock-fan navel-gazing can feel parochial.

Spotlight2015

A Boston Globe team investigates Catholic Church abuse. It's a procedural about ordinary people doing necessary work, with no grandstanding or manufactured drama. Quietly powerful.

But It's fundamentally about systems and investigation rather than individual character arcs. Some find it dry.

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel2012

British pensioners move to India and discover new versions of themselves. Warm, funny, and genuinely interested in older people as full human beings with desire and ambition and messiness.

But It's gentler and more comedic than Koshish. The tone might feel too light if you're looking for emotional weight.

Steel Magnolias1989

Six women in Louisiana build a fierce, loving friendship across hardship. It's about how people live together, argue, support each other, and keep going. Sally Field is extraordinary.

But The Southern-fried dialogue can feel theatrical. It occasionally tips into sentimentality rather than restraint.

Secrets & Lies1996

Mike Leigh's sprawling ensemble about a Black optometrist discovering her white birth mother. Improvisational, raw, brutally funny about family, race, and the stories we tell ourselves.

But It's two and a half hours of often painful conversations. There are no easy answers or cathartic moments.

Ikiru1952

Kurosawa's film about a dying bureaucrat who discovers what his life meant. Japanese cinema's greatest statement on the everyday as sacred, and on finding purpose in small, repetitive, ordinary acts of care.

But It moves slowly and asks you to sit with grief and acceptance rather than fight against them. Emotionally demanding.

A Separation2011

Both films refuse to simplify their couples into symbols or lessons. Hari and Aarti, like the couple in A Separation, are people wrestling with real choices—not illustrations of a theme.

Asghar Farhadi's Iranian drama about a marriage collapsing and the cascading consequences it has on everyone around them. Morally complex, furiously intelligent, unsentimental about love and obligation.

But There are no heroes. Every character is partly right and partly wrong, which frustrates people who want to know whose side to take.