Insert Tolstoy quote here.

Ramchandra Purushottam Joshi (2013) was based on a stage play, and it shows; the movie is almost Aristotelian in its tight focus on a the events happening in a single house, to a particular family, over the course of eight hours, and also in its penchant for characters explaining interesting things that are happening just off stage.  naturally, the movie opens with a lengthy special effects sequence, making heavy use of computer animation that is so imaginative and so dated that it really deserves a soundtrack by Thomas Dolby.

Once again, we're visiting a shiny, modernized, technologically advanced Yamalok.  This time, Chitragupta is still around and doing interesting stuff off-screen, but the old Yama has retired.  The new guy (and the imdb is not great with Marathi cinema, so I am not sure who plays him, or most of the other characters) is slick, smart and ambitious.  He's got a grand scheme: give some of the better behaved souls in his care an early release, allowing them to sped a day on Earth visiting their loved ones and telling them about how great Yamalok is now before ascending to heaven.

The proof of concept soul selected is Ramchandra Purushottam Joshi (Dilip Prabhavalkar), a scrupulously honest retired civil servant.  Ramchandra is offered the chance to go back to earth for eight hours, on the anniversary of his death, and he is thrilled to have the chance to see his family again.  He's so excited that he wastes they first hour telling his "minder," the dour green psychopomp Ugrakesh all about his doting wife Janki (Suhas Joshi), responsible elder son Nishikant, only daughter Sandhya, and straight-laced younger son Ninad.

But a lot can change in a year.  When Ramchandra finally enters the house, he discovers that Ninad is now an angry drunk, Sandhya is nowhere to be seen, Nishikant is plotting with his in-laws to sell off the ancestral home, and Janki refuses to accept his death and spends all day locked in her room talking to an imaginary husband.  And Ramchandra is powerless to help, because no one can see or hear him . . . until Sandhya makes it home.

There's a moment late in the film when Ramchandra notices that the trees in the garden are dying, and explains to Ugrakesh that no one has been putting in the work to maintain them.   It's an incredibly obvious metaphor, but an effective one.  This is a story about how quickly a family can fall apart, and how hard it is to put it back together, but it succeeds by focusing on this particular family being unhappy in its own way.