8 AM Metro (2023)

Two strangers inadvertently 8 AM Metro bump into each other in the metro and strike up an unlikely friendship, and in the process find themselves and each other.

Can a man and a woman be just friends? Films, and more, before 8 AM Metro have tried to explore this territory. Rarely has an entire movie gone about it though with as little passion, making you grateful that sex doesn’t complicate matters and add more dreary minutes to it. Devaiah as Preetam and Kher as Iravati meet on an 8 am Hyderabad Metro through a contrivance with which all love stories – even like these — begin. She is afraid of trains, he is visibly moping, and the two “find” each other on two up-and-down rides of the train daily. By find, we mean they tend to talk poetry, or write and spout poetry, or even if they aren’t, talk in a non-agitated monotone that sounds like they are reading lines to each other. A lot of their story happens on the Metro, but even fellow passengers provide little respite from their tendency to talk about the moon, sun, sky, pain, and as days go 8 AM Metro on, the deaths that changed them. They sometimes shed tears, sometimes get off to take a walk around the city, and most crucially, enjoy their filter coffee. What is different from other films with such characters is that both are married and neither hides the fact, and that the conversation often extends to their respective spouses. They also seem happy in their respective marriages, with supportive partners who have seen them through thick and thin. It’s also nice to see a film centred around two cities which one doesn’t see very often at the cinema – Nanded and Hyderabad. But the film does not make much of that, apart from the actors speaking a smattering of Marathi. Neither does anything seem poignantly missing in the lives of the two, for us to care deeply about them, nor does any tension occur between them, to make us wonder how it will end up.