Aditya Kripalani’s sensitive portrayal of suicide in Not Today reminds us exactly what we need to talk about

At first, Not Today feels like a camera casually dropped in Mumbai, but soon it reflects the fractures of broken souls trying to survive a fragile and quietly broken world.

Suicide is a word we have a tendency to shy away from, almost as if saying it out loud might make it more real than it already is. Because the thought of someone choosing to end their own life feels so incomprehensible that, for anyone outside that state of despair or darkness, it’s almost impossible to understand. Yet that very incomprehensibility is why we must talk about it. As keeping it under hush-hish tones does not protect us, it simply just isolates us from those who are genuinely struggling. Hence, honest conversations about suicide can create the space for understanding, compassion, and, most importantly, intervention at the right time so that the inevitability can be avoided. But as a society, we often look away, preferring to discuss everything else except the shadows within. The stigma is so deeply entrenched that instead of empathy, people are met with judgment or ignorance. And so, what could be an opportunity for connection and prevention is lost to silence. 

For instance, whenever a celebrity dies by suicide or a young student takes their own life, we rush to assign blame, pin-pointing to external pressures, to circumstances, to others. Spinning it all into a neat “cause-and-effect” story, which feels easier to do and serve drama rather than looking within. Let’s admit it that we are all afraid to acknowledge the demons and disturbances we all carry to different degrees. Some of us make it through past them while others need help. And that’s the uncomfortable truth at the heart of the independent film Not Today, written, directed and produced by Aditya Kripalani.

Also Read: The intersection of cinema and mental health ft Aditya Kripalani!

This hour-and-a-half film doesn’t sensationalize or dramatize. Instead, it slowly draws you in, wrapping you in the intimate conversation between two broken souls. It dismantles the stereotype of the “disturbed person” as unknowable, and instead shows us two flawed, wounded individuals simply trying to heal each other.

We meet Aliah Rupawala (Rucha Inamdar), a 24-year-old who has just joined a suicide prevention center. She learns the drill- how to gauge the severity of a call, how to talk someone down from the edge. Parallelly, we see Ashwin Mathur (Harsh Chhaya), an older man about to jump from a terrace, interrupted only because children spot him. When Aliah takes one of her second calls on her very first day, it turns out to be Ashwin himself, who is revealed to be a person who is no stranger to this process. He’s been a counselor for 15 years in a suicide prevention centre, and he calls out every move she tries, word for word from the manual. Her seniors ask her to disconnect as soon as they know of this but Aliah refuses to give up.

Something about her compels Ashwin to stay on the line with her. And isn’t that what we all want? Not just a listener ticking boxes, but someone who truly connects, who feels or understands. So Aliah does the unthinkable, she begins sharing her own life, her adoption, her grief after losing someone to suicide, her own pain. In response, Ashwin begins to open up too about his difficult childhood with an alcoholic father, a turbulent marriage, his addiction, his estranged daughter. What begins as a call turns into a fragile bond, a night-long exchange of deep seated confessions and memories built from traumas.

Kripalani cleverly uses this back-and-forth not just as dialogue, but as a narrative device painted against the night skies of Mumbai with lines visible in them as if straight out of Van Gogh's paintings. Aliah merges calls with her mother and friend so Ashwin hears her world beyond the headset. He leads her, in turn, to places tied to his past from bars in Bandra, construction sites to an office, almost as if mapping the terrain of his trauma. Together, they stitch stories and themselves, block by block, until the inevitable question looms - will Ashwin jump, or will he choose otherwise?

What unfolds is not just Ashwin’s story, but a tapestry of generational trauma, societal pressures, and the fragile balancing act of life itself. In taking him out of his repressive loop, where everything feels doomed and meaningless as life itself is already dead, Aliah doesn’t just save him; she heals herself too. The film makes a radical point as suicide prevention isn’t about scripts or strategies alone. It’s about presence, connection, and time. Sometimes all it takes is someone to talk you out of your repetitive thought loop, enough to buy a few more hours. Enough to say: Not Today! And while that serves as a starting point, the film also underlines something crucial which is that timely intervention or therapy at the right stage could have made a difference. Ashwin, after all, was a counsellor himself. He knew the techniques, the language, or how to talk someone else out of despair. But at the end of the day, he couldn't do it for himself because he too is a human being, exhausted from suffering endlessly. That reminder that even those who guide others need help too as do countless people who carry their pain silently is powerful. Because therapy or support cannot begin only when someone is standing on a ledge, about to jump, or with a rope in their hand. It has to start much earlier, so that they never get pushed to that edge at all!

You can also check out our interview with him here in which discusses his film, the perception of suicide in our country, and much more! 

Not Today is currently available to watch on YouTube!

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