Humour blends with sadness beautifully in the film without making the script melodramatic.

As a viewing experience, Waiting is refreshingly restrained when compared to most other Hindi films. It struck me as a cross between Lost In Translation (2003) and The Descendants (2011).

Waiting is a film which you must include in your “Must watch” list. Director Anu Menon paces the film masterfully and her hold on the narrative rarely flounders. It has an enviable DNA with the likes of Naseeruddin Shah, Kalki Koechlin and Rajat Kapoor. It can’t get better than this!

If you are looking to explore the potential of Bollywood storylines, this is a must watch. A completely common occurrence that is in abundance around us has been taken and molded into a unique story that will stay with you.

…apart from a few wobbles, Waiting walks the line between emotional resonance and emotional manipulation skilfully. Hospitals, whether on the big or small screen, are usually used for their dramatic possibilities: IV demanded “stat”, failing hearts electro-shocked into life. How curious that someone glimpsed, in the same setting, the emotional possibilities of inaction, of waiting.

The film deserves a watch for being one that doesn’t try too hard and for its approach to an extreme situation. Sure, there’s a lot of sobbing, resentment and much of ‘what if’ and ‘I should have’. But there’s also reasoning, acceptance and the ability to envision a life beyond the catastrophic event.

It’s about swinging between hope and despair. It’s about a bond forged in the face of a possible bereavement.

Waiting is too sparsely plotted to realise its ambitions, but Menon, who has co-written the film with James Ruzicka, does raise important questions on the dilemmas faced by the family members of comatose patients. Who decides the treatment methods, and when is it time to stop waiting and move on? A less neat and more rigourously written movie would have waited for the uncomfortable answers to these knotty questions to come less easily.