The Lunchbox

A lunchbox meant for a young Mumbai housewife's husband is delivered to the wrong office, reaching a solitary man nearing retirement instead. Ila, hoping to revive her marriage through her cooking, sends her meals through the city's famously precise network of dabbawalas. Saajan, an office worker with little in his life beyond his desk, receives them by mistake. She writes a note to find out what happened, and he answers. Through messages tucked into the tins, the two strangers build a private world of confidences, one that increasingly competes with the lives they actually lead.

Ritesh Batra wrote and directed this drama, his first feature, and later directed Our Souls at Night and The Sense of an Ending. Irrfan Khan plays Saajan, Nimrat Kaur plays Ila, and Nawazuddin Siddiqui plays Shaikh, a colleague of Saajan's; Lillete Dubey and Nasir Khan appear as Ila's parents. Anurag Kashyap and Guneet Monga are among the producers. The film runs 104 minutes and was made for about 3 million dollars, a modest figure that it recovered several times over with roughly 17 million dollars worldwide.

Reception was strong on both sides. On IMDb it holds 7.8 from around 68,000 votes, and on TMDB 7.4 from a much smaller base of 848 votes. A critics' rating of 7.7 from 121 reviews places it close to the audience scores, suggesting the film travelled well beyond its Indian setting. That reach fits a story whose central device, food sent through a vast city, gives two lonely people a way to speak to each other.