Review: The Bakery Shop (2025)

Narrative timing has always been a challenge when making a short film. However, few manage to achieve both narrative propulsion and emotional depth within its limited duration. The Bakery Shop, an Assamese short film, directed with lean precision and psychological nuance by Rupankar Das, takes a simple incident and turns it into a tense tale of trust and deception. At first, the film appears to be a story of a man's survival in a cruel city. But beneath the surface of its seemingly benign plot, it unfurls a quietly radical study in moral entropy, male fragility, and existential recalibration.

This is a deceptively quiet film—so much so that we are lulled into expecting a violent confrontation at some point. But it never happens. And perhaps, due to the film’s inherent languidness, that tension remains deliberately unresolved. The film is also about how small acts of cheating often go unnoticed in our society, largely because the perpetrators believe they can get away with their misdeeds. There is a particular mindset at play—one that fails to acknowledge that even the smallest crime may one day be punished. By portraying this, the filmmaker finds passages of exquisite poetry within the blank verse of everyday Indian life. Having captured the tender reality of a couple expecting a child, the film gently draws us into their world—a world marked by quiet love and the daily struggle to make ends meet.

The film protagonist's profession is not defined because he essentially represents a more general idea of an everyman, someone whose problems, anxieties, and ethical hurdles could belong to anyone negotiating the uncertain actions of modern urban life. His wife has a craving for a cheesecake and orders him to get one. He is not  wealthy, though, and would not normally do this but is determined to fulfill this simple wish and is made unaware that it will spiral into an unexpected series of complicated situations. The calm tone is abruptly altered to a serious urban parable in the bakery. Something goes awry where the tragedy, in a sense, is the actual inconsequential tragedy and its social and personal reverberations.

By the end, the film does not transform into something overly melodramatic. There is no final-act epiphany, no sudden moral clarity—only a gentle erosion into a quieter version of itself, one that suggests that even in the darkest times, hope endures. The protagonist has learned something, but whether it empowers him or merely sobers him is left to the viewer’s interpretation. The film is really not about the act of deception or the daily struggles of a freelancer; what shines bright instead is his interior life, his desires, disappointments, and dilemmas.

The Bakery Shop is, ultimately, about the disproportionate fallout of small failures, and how moments of banal adversity can unmask the fragility of our personality. It’s an honest short film that earns its gravity not through stylistic flourish, but through ethical complexity. 

The Bakery Shop has been officially selected at Goa International Film Competition, Brahmaputra Valley Film Festival, and other short film festivals.

You can watch the film on YouTube.

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