There’s a particular kind of hush that lives in Songs of Paradise. Not the silence of absence, but the kind that hums beneath skin—where music waits not to entertain, but to survive. The film doesn’t arrive. It appears. Like breath on glass.
Danish Renzu does not direct this film so much as he listens to it. It unfolds without urgency, almost suspicious of plot. There’s no desire to dazzle, no interest in flattening its subject for easy sympathy. Instead, he offers Noor Begum—two iterations of a woman not torn between past and present, but threaded tightly across time. Saba Azad plays Noor in her younger years with a stillness that doesn’t beg to be watched, and Soni Razdan, in the autumn of that same life, doesn’t demand reverence. Both women simply are. It’s the audience that must come to them.
And the film does not guide. It doesn’t care whether you’re following. There are no breadcrumbs here, no tidy arcs, no manufactured catharsis. What you get instead is tone. Mood. An atmosphere heavy with things unsaid: the weight of a voice not permitted to rise, the ghost of applause never heard, the sound of rooms that remember when they used to echo with music.
Kashmir in this film isn’t postcarded. It doesn’t ask to be admired. It exists with a certain fatigue, as though tired of being captured, aestheticised, repackaged. The beauty is incidental, the pain implied. Everything feels intimate, but not inviting. As if the camera is always slightly outside the door.
This is not a film about greatness. Noor’s singing does not crown her—it complicates her. Her voice isn’t a miracle; it’s a burden she refuses to put down. And that refusal, quiet and constant, is where the film finds its pulse.
The music is lived-in. It’s a form of communication between Noor and herself. A way to remember. A way not to disappear. Don’t expect soaring crescendos or engineered weeping. The soundtrack doesn’t underline the emotion; it seeps into it.
Is it slow? Yes. Does it resist the comforts of traditional storytelling? Absolutely. But that’s the point. Songs of Paradise isn’t concerned with entertaining you. It’s concerned with outlasting you. With staying behind, like a tune you can’t name but can’t shake off.
It’s not a film that ends. It recedes.
And some days later, you’ll hear something—maybe just a note—and realise you never quite left.
IWMBuzz rates it 3.5/5 stars.
Songs Of Paradise is streaming on Prime Video.
