Few illnesses alter a person’s identity as profoundly as those that deprive a person of the ability to speak. For someone whose profession, confidence, and relationships are built around their voice, the loss is far more than physical. Filmmakers Nandita Roy and Shiboprosad Mukherjee explore this premise in Konttho: Sound of Silence (2019), a Bengali drama inspired by the real-life journey of a railway announcer who lost his voice to throat cancer. Screened at the Bhubaneswar Film Festival 2026 in the presence of director Nandita Roy, the film attempts to balance hope with hardship — sometimes movingly, but often too predictably.
Arjun Mallick (Shiboprosad Mukherjee) is a radio jockey (RJ) at a well-known radio station in Kolkata. His voice is famous, reaches the masses, and draws listeners with his empathetic, humane worldview, especially in his approach to relationships. Speaking — professionally and emotionally — is central to Arjun’s identity. His voice connects him to strangers on air as much as it does to his family. He has a happy family with a wife and son, and though he claims he doesn’t get time to be with his son, the audience is shown a happy family.
What’s more? He is also a voice coach (or a singing coach) to students and conducts vocal exercises every morning. It’s established very early in the film how important his voice is in his life. Running parallel to this celebration of his voice is a persistent, violent cough. He is a chronic smoker, and hence, smoking dominates the scenes — a not-so-subtle warning against smoking, which is a widespread practice in Kolkata.
The film leaves little room for surprise; its emotional trajectory becomes apparent almost immediately. This predictability is a major drawback in Konttho. For a person like Arjun, losing his voice means losing his job and his ability to connect with people, and, subsequently, becoming an angry, frustrated, and violent person who becomes a bane to his family, particularly his wife, Pritha (Paoli Dam).
Arjun coughs up blood the night he is unable to speak at an awards show where he wins big, meets the doctor, and discovers he has throat cancer. He would have to undergo a laryngectomy, and no matter how hard he pushes against it, the doctor, as well as his wife, convinces him to prioritize his life over his voice. The result is an angry, depressed man who finds neither a job nor a purpose in his existence.
The film does not take long to paint a clear picture of Arjun’s transformation. Yet Konttho is not without insight. Its strengths lie less in its overarching narrative than in its observation of everyday behavior surrounding disability. An elderly aunt is introduced who quickly begins to lay out betel leaves on the bed in an effort to cure cancer the old-world way. But she begins speaking loudly to Arjun, even though he can hear.
Roy quietly exposes a familiar social reflex: she begins speaking loudly to Arjun as though the loss of speech must also imply a loss of hearing. It is one of the film’s most perceptive observations about disability — not the illness itself, but the assumptions surrounding it. It’s these little behavioral changes that push Arjun into depression until his doctor advises him to join a laryngectomy-support group. When that doesn’t work out either, he is sent to a speech therapist, Romila (Jaya Ahsan). And thereon begins Arjun’s struggle to find his voice.
The writing seems too loose, and it’s only through subtle glimpses into the lives of the three characters — Arjun, his wife Pritha, and his doctor Romila — that the film somehow tags along. Romila has a bit of a past; she is moving to Dhaka and cannot take any more patients until her daughter convinces her because, well, Arjun saved her life and their mother-daughter relationship on air once during a radio show. And all of a sudden, Romila feels compelled to do this for the man as a return for their debt to him. Where haven’t the Indian audiences seen that before?
I was more interested in seeing the repercussions of Arjun’s behavior on his wife. Paoli Dam plays his wife Pritha quite remarkably, considering there wasn’t much written for her, except being the supportive wife and the victim of her husband’s anger and violence. In one of the film’s most affecting scenes, Arjun grabs Pritha by the throat in a fit of rage. As she struggles to breathe, the sounds she makes resemble the strained oesophageal voice Arjun is learning to produce.
The scene creates an unsettling parallel: his voice has been medically taken away, while hers is suppressed by fear. Both the man and the woman are voiceless; one is in terror, and the other is enraged by Pritha’s reluctance to tend to his needs, which he conveys through gestures and a slate. The poor wife is put in a tough spot by the doctor Romila, who tells her Arjun has to learn to use his oesophageal voice and she should refuse to entertain any communication otherwise — he needs to ‘ask’ for everything.
While Pritha and Arjun are both quite predictable, run-of-the-mill characters, Romila is easily the film’s most compelling presence. Jaya Ahsan does more than a good job of bringing out the chirpy side of her role as a speech therapist, who is introduced as a screaming woman in her first scene. Ahsan makes the character her own, bringing a lot of flavor and a powerful screen presence to her role in an otherwise dull film. Romila also becomes the object of Pritha’s jealousy, who begins to feel neglected as Arjun spends more time in public spaces with Romila, learning to speak with others using his oesophageal voice. It is through these subtleties that Nandita Roy keeps audiences engaged with the story.
But like every other Indian film, Konttho too needs to reinstate its male protagonist. Arjun finally gets a kids’ radio show at his wife’s insistence, who speaks to his boss and colleagues. The sequence with the radio station employees seems highly unrealistic to an audience who knows how cut-throat the entertainment industry is. Nevertheless, Roy manages to pay tribute to Satyajit Ray’s Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (1969), where Arjun lends his robotic voice to an alien character.
He speaks with the help of a machine, but the film quickly creates circumstances in which his machine fails while he is conversing with a kid on air, and he has to use his oesophageal voice. The film comes full circle, and it seems an all’s well that ends well kind of a trope. Arjun wins an award too, and the film ends with an inspiring ode to survivors of laryngectomy.
I could give the predictability and the illusion of supportive colleagues in the film a pass because it was released in 2019, in the pre-COVID era, when such things might have existed. Such aspects of the film seem too good to be true when you watch it now. As Nandita Roy mentions, the film was inspired by the real-life struggle of a railway announcer who lost his voice to throat cancer and had to learn to use his oesophageal voice through extensive training and speech therapy. Konttho deserves credit for drawing attention to lives rarely represented on screen.
Yet empathy alone cannot compensate for conventional writing. With its remarkable cast and emotionally rich premise, Konttho could have been far more impactful with a little more finesse, a deeper exploration of disability, identity, and recovery, and a little less predictability.
Retrospective Courtesy of Neha Jha
Feature Image Credit to Windows Production