I Won't Wait: When Closure Refuses to Arrive

About five minutes into I Won’t Wait, I realised two things:  (1) This is not a boxing film, and  (2) The film is going to trick you.

Not with a dramatic twist or sudden reveal, but in the way someone quietly rearranges the table in your room and waits for you to bump into it. You think you’re watching a boxing film. You think you’re here for the punches. But I Won’t Wait is not about boxing. It’s about being unable to move. About the emotional equivalent of buffering endlessly. The punches come later; the paralysis comes first.

I Won’t Wait is a student-made feature screened on 15th November 2025 under Film Fataka, Ashoka’s film festival for student films. Directed by Aritra Mukhopadhyay (UG'27) with Assistant Director Nayantara Pal (UG'28), it follows Ron, played by Vishwa Krishnan (UG’28) and Abir, played by Liam Munshi (UG’28), as they set up an underground boxing club on campus.

But before any script existed, before cast or locations were decided, the film lived as a scribbled mind map, Mukhopadhyay (UG’27) made at an airport. “A good chunk of cinematography is just watching movies until your brain starts thinking in scenes,” he laughed. And it shows.

The opening sequences drift like half-remembered dreams: a simple montage showing Abir, a student trying to get over his ex, trapped in his memories and caught up in the same routines with odd little visual jokes that loosen your guard so the tension can slip in unnoticed. When I later asked why the film keeps breaking intensity with these strange, wandering inserts, especially when the marketing leaned so heavily on boxing, the directors told me it was intentional: “We want you to feel like Abir.” The slow pace is the point, an emotional stretch of time forcing you to sit inside Abir’s head, inside that restlessness—caught in the fog of not knowing what you want, who you are, or how to move.

That fog thickens the moment Ron arrives. Ron, also a student, is replaying a different kind of ache by reliving his defeat in the ring while moving through a world that insists on remembering his brother instead of him. Their meeting on the bridge is lit in a way that almost betrays the script. Abir is shown in a warm yellow glow around midnight as Ron is standing under harsh, unforgiving daylight. Then they shake hands at dawn. Accident or intentional, the effect is striking. It feels as if Ron jolts Abir awake or that Abir’s fog bleeds into Ron.

For a while, the film lives on these small shifts, one-liners that crack open their dynamic, glances that carry more tension than the punches yet to come. You think you can predict where the film is going. Then, of course, it smirks and proves you wrong. I was not prepared for an elevator fight scene that uses its limited space inventively, shot with the confidence you usually associate with high-budget thrillers. Nor was I prepared for the flashbacks of Ron and his fight, edited with such clean precision that you can’t even tell whether they were shot in the Black Box Theatre, the camera moving as if it, too, is trapped in the tight space with them, forced to absorb every blow. The standout, though, the moment that impressed me most, is Liam’s glasses reflecting the footage of Maya, his ex, a memory looping through a surface not meant to hold it. Cinema doing what memory does: repeating until it distorts.

But under all this visual flair is a far more unsettling story involving anything but fists. Ron and Abir, the directors explained, are two emotional extremes: aggression and emptiness, both trapped, both trying and failing to find closure. Ron is everything that pushes outward: volatile and impulsive. Abir is everything that caves inward: unsure and suffocating in the softness of his own indecision. They move towards each other not out of affinity but out of desperation, like two drowning men clinging to the same piece of driftwood.

Which is why the phone call of Ranveer hits as hard as it does. Ranveer, played by Deviyaansh Sharma (UG’28), exists only as a voice, but it slices through Ron’s psyche. He is Ron’s elder brother, his former namesake, the original Ranveer. The golden boy whose reputation survived even after he was caught running an underground boxing fight club, sacrificing friends to protect his own standing. Ron changed his name to escape that shadow, to refuse that inheritance. “Bhai, hum same parivaar se aate hain”(Brother, we come from the same family), he tells him. “If push comes to shove, you’d throw Abir under the bus.” It’s cruel, but it’s not entirely wrong; that’s what makes it devastating. Ron’s impulse is to resist: “That’s not why I took Abir.” But by then, we’ve already seen the hesitation in him, the quiet inheritance of his brother’s violence. The tragedy is not that Ron becomes Ranveer. It’s that he becomes him so slowly, so quietly, that he doesn’t notice it happening. The audience realises before he does; Abir realises long before he does. 

The costumes, too, betray this shift. Abir begins the film in muted patterns, expressive but faded, as if exhaustion has washed out the colour. As Ron enters his life, Abir’s clothes subtly mimic Ron’s, an influence that seeps all the way into the fabric. Meanwhile, Ron’s wardrobe grows starker, harsher, until the final scene, where he is black and white, stripped clean of nuance.

By the end, it becomes clear that I Won’t Wait isn’t a story of heroes or villains. The directors insisted on this: there are none. There is only damage. Ron turns into his brother without wanting to. Abir grasps at secrecy not for excitement but simply to feel like he is doing something. Both boys want to move on, yet neither knows how to imagine a life beyond their present versions of themselves. Closure is a horizon they keep walking towards without getting closer.

I entered the screening expecting a polished student film. I left feeling, somewhat annoyingly, impressed.

I Won’t Wait is messy, ambitious, occasionally stumbling, but always moving with intention. It is a film made not by students but by storytellers unafraid of sincerity, unafraid of excess, unafraid of trying. They don’t wait. And for once, I’m glad they didn’t. (Edited by Giya Sood and Maya Ribeiro.)