Kani Kusruti

A parcel comes from Germany with no note. Inside is a rice cooker, red and expensive, sent by a husband who has stopped ringing. Late that night in All We Imagine as Light (2024), Kani Kusruti's Prabha picks it up in the kitchen and holds it against her chest, and that is all she does. She does not cry. Payal Kapadia gives her no line and she does not look for one. That is Kusruti's method in a sentence: she keeps the face quiet and leaves us to work out what is going on behind it.

She learned it on stage first. She began in theatre in Kerala in the early 2000s and spent two years at Lecoq's school of physical theatre in Paris, and it shows in how she can hold a body still without going slack. The film parts came slowly and were small: a debut in Anyar (2003), Zeba in a segment of Kerala Cafe (2009), Lajjo in North 24 Kaatham (2013), a mother in the action film Spyder (2017). Small parts do not ask for stillness; they ask you to be clear in ninety seconds and leave. The lead in Sajin Baabu's Biriyaani (2019), as Khadeeja, was the first time a film was built around her. Then 2024 brought two at once: Prabha for Kapadia, and Anila, a mother, in Shuchi Talati's Girls Will Be Girls, which we have not reviewed.

The women she plays are hemmed in. Nurses, mothers, wives, migrants in other people's cities, women with obligations and not much room. What she brings to them is a refusal to explain. Prabha never tells Anu, the younger nurse Divya Prabha plays, how lonely she is; she tells her off for borrowing money, and the scenes between the two are the warmest in the film. We did not expect to be moved by a woman embracing a kitchen appliance, and we were, because Kusruti gave us nothing to hold on to but her hands and the cold metal, and made that enough.

The method has a cost. A director who does not know what to do with a quiet actor will leave her at the edge of the frame with nothing to do, and the early supporting parts gave her little chance to show otherwise. Kusruti has also said she does not much relate to Prabha: "personally, I find it very hard to resonate my thoughts with Prabha's." We suspect the distance helped. She is not playing herself and she is not asking us to approve of the woman, only to watch her.

Since 2024 she has taken more Hindi and Malayalam work and moved into producing. That may be the sensible move, since the parts she is best in are the ones nobody writes unless somebody insists. Kapadia insisted. We would like to see who does next.