Side A Side B (2016) Review: A Love Story in Transit

There’s something unshakably romantic about long train journeys—especially when laced with love, music, and the inevitability of parting. Side A Side B, Sudhish Kamath’s indie experiment, unfolds entirely on a train, where two young lovers ride toward a future that may or may not include each other. It’s a breakup film in slow motion, scored live, framed in split screens, and soaked in memory.

Our much-in-love leads Joel (Rahul Rajkhowa) and Shivi (Shivranjini Singh) find their relationship on a rickety trail as they set out on this long journey. Guwahati to Bombay. Their lives will never be the same again. Over the next 44 hours, their journey becomes a quiet reckoning—equal parts confessional and performance.

Kamath doesn’t give us a traditional musical. The songs are performed live—no playback, no studio polish. What we get instead is intimacy. Rawness. Each track feels improvised yet purposeful, like conversations you don’t know you’re still rehearsing. Rahul, with his mellow charm and deft fingerpicking, and Shivranjini, enigmatic and playful, carry the narrative on their chords.

The film segues from a song to the story and back to a song. Each song is a story in itself. They flow like conversations propelling the story. The lyrics, penned by Raja Sen, are unguarded, contemporary, and precisely what this generation would say if they had the right words.

Shot guerrilla-style in five days with just two phones—an iPhone 6S Plus and a Samsung S7—the film carries the grain of a documentary. The handheld, unstaged feel adds to the illusion that we’re eavesdropping, not watching. Kamath’s use of split screen isn’t a gimmick but a language: two perspectives, side by side, never quite meeting. A metaphor, perhaps, for what’s left unsaid.

There are flashbacks, beautifully lit, that pull us back to the warmth of what was. And then we’re back on the train, in that strange purgatory between holding on and letting go. The performances don’t feel rehearsed—because they aren’t. Shivranjini, especially, captures the quiet crisis of indecision with her eyes. There’s a hesitance to her presence, a tenderness tinged with fear.

The title, Side A Side B, is a nostalgic nod to cassette-era love—when every mixtape held unspoken intention. Kamath riffs on that idea, slipping in familiar tunes from the ’90s, remixed and modernized, like old emotions in new clothes. It’s playful, sometimes cheeky, but always affectionate.

Side A Side B isn’t a perfect film, but it’s an honest one. It doesn’t chase grandeur; it embraces the handmade, the imperfect, the fleeting. In doing so, it captures something precious: the ache of young love and the knowledge that, sometimes, the best you can do is keep singing—even if the song is ending.