Mithya is an intimate story of a young boy struggling to make sense of his life, which has been shattered into countless pieces after his parents pass away. It marks director Sumanth Bhat’s feature film debut. Previously, he helmed the Kannada web series Ekam, also co-produced by Rakshit Shetty. Mithya sheds light on the internal turmoil of an 11-year-old boy, Mithun. Taken in by his aunt’s family after his mother dies by suicide — leaving him and his younger sister orphaned — he is uprooted from Mumbai, where he was born and raised, and placed in the slow, quiet countryside of Udupi. He prefers to be called Mithya, but adjusting to his new reality is far from easy.

How much does a young boy have to go through to be allowed the freedom to have an emotional breakdown? When we first meet Mithya (Athish Shetty), what we see is his back turned towards us as he travels on a train from somewhere to somewhere else. We later learn that he’s not travelling out of choice. He’s being displaced from his home in Mumbai to Udipi in Southern Karnataka where he will live with his uncle, aunt and their two daughters. Like Mithya, the film about him too has its back turned towards us. It’s not a film that grants you the solace of having empathised with its broken protagonist. Instead, it reveals these broken pieces so sparsely that we feel as lost and helpless as he does.

Many a time in Sumanth Bhat’s Mithya, conditioned by today’s happenings and a generally unsafe world, the stomach knots up with uncertainty, wondering what would befall a child that seems to trust adults. You heave a sigh of relief, only to realise that the child can still be injured through other means — what he hears and how he’s treated — especially when he’s too young to remember it all, but also too old to forgetfully. Snatches of these conversations linger and play on in his head like scabs being yanked off.

Child Actors in Indian mainstream films, largely, follow an ancient repertoire. They emulate the sticky sweetness of store-bought fruit juice, hiding their characters’ deeper flavours under their affected cadence and countenance. Rarely assigned with weightier emotions like rage or grief, their ‘cinematic’ is confined to giggles, pouts or pulling long faces. In mainstream imagination, child personas offer little intellectual stimulation to the audience; they come devoid of any deeper meaning to decipher.