Cyrus -2005- — Being

What follows is a slow, methodical infiltration. Cyrus doesn’t just enter the Sethna household; he unlocks it. He finds the secret cracks in the foundation: Dinshaw’s artistic impotence, his wife Katy’s (Dimple Kapadia) simmering sexual frustration, and the violent greed of their son, Fardounjee (Boman Irani). Director Homi Adajania, making his debut, did something radical. He treated an Indian-English film not with the reverence of art cinema, but with the gritty tension of a Coen brothers thriller. The camera lingers. The silences are deafening. The humor is so dry it draws blood.

Two decades later, we ask: What made this oddity so unforgettable? The plot is deceptively simple. A one-armed, disheveled artist named Cyrus (Saif Ali Khan) shows up at the doorstep of an eccentric, retired Parsi sculptor, Dinshaw Sethna (Naseeruddin Shah). Cyrus claims to be an admirer. But his eyes—hungry, intelligent, and utterly hollow—tell a different story. being cyrus -2005-

Uncomfortable. Brilliant. Unmissable.

Published: A Retrospective