Monet Roy Saha, the 43-year-old director of the Bengali film Prakriti, is a sculptor and filmmaker based in Mumbai, Kolkata and Agartala, Tripura, his hometown. The artist’s eye in every frame of Prakriti is unmistakable.

Last leg of the pandemic. Instead of the usual frenetic bustle and high-decibel street noise of Kolkata, there is a gentle return to normalcy. Masked-up humans are still the norm. The film opens with a languorously pretty montage of Durga idols being carefully crafted by male hands, before we enter the home of the protagonist Aditi (Prakriti Dutta Mukerjee). Another montage of still frames — neat, silent and still, until a violent noise interrupts the house’s eerie stillness. We see Aditi, a school teacher, with scars — physical, and in turn, emotional. While taking her online class, she has to grapple with a question one of her adolescent students ask: Who is a criminal? Her answers lead........

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