The film resists easy binaries. It refuses the shorthand of “villainous tradition” versus “liberated modernity.” Instead, it mines the grey seams between generations. Her aunt—Bai—who organizes the household and the festivals with a precision that resembles prayer, is as complicit in confinement as she is in tenderness. The village priest is not a caricature of ignorance but a man with regrets sequestered behind ritual. Even the local MLA’s son, who might have been reduced to a swaggering antagonist, is revealed in private to be a man worn thin by inherited expectations.