Slow Burn, Amal Singh’s take on the portal fantasy – where people move from the known word into an alternative universe – opens with a clown. Rishi Tripathi, a struggling 27-year-old acting hopeful, has been hired by a Mumbai textile giant for his son’s seventh birthday party. As he goes through the humiliating motions, peppered by the bratty demands of the “birthday devil”, there is a brief moment of buoyancy before it all comes tumbling down, literally.
Nursing an injured foot, Rishi makes his way to a railway station and calls his father in Varanasi. He doesn’t think he can do it anymore. It being trying to make a name for himself in that notoriously fickle and hard-to-break-into industry – Bollywood. After all, he moved to the big city to find meaning in his work, and then meaning in his life. But what has his life since then been but a “montage of failures and bad decisions”? His father reminds him that Tripathis don’t quit, and makes him promise to keep trying. “If it still doesn’t happen,” he adds, “home is there for you, always. Your mother and I will be waiting for you.”
Rishi, with his “lithe frame and “dark features”, keeps trying, even as...