Can you fall in love with someone you have never met?
Overview
A mistaken delivery in Mumbai's famously efficient lunchbox delivery system (Mumbai's Dabbawallahs) connects a young housewife to a stranger in the dusk of his life. They build a fantasy world together through notes in the lunchbox. Gradually, this fantasy threatens to overwhelm their reality.
Ratings
Curator score: 8.5/10
IMDb: 7.8/10
Letterboxd: 4.07/5
Rotten Tomatoes: 97%
Metacritic: 76
TMDB: 7.4/10
Director
Ritesh Batra
Production
DAR Motion Pictures, A.S.A.P. Films, Sikhya Entertainment, National Film Development Corporation of India, Rohfilm, Cine Mosaic
A quietly devastating romance built on restraint, loneliness, and the small miracles of being understood. Its emotional power comes from ordinary details rather than melodrama, making it especially rewarding for viewers who like intimate character studies and bittersweet endings.
Best for
fans of understated romance
viewers who enjoy slow-burn emotional drama
people drawn to stories of loneliness and connection
audiences who like urban slice-of-life films
fans of tender, melancholy cinema
Skip if
you want high-energy plotting or big dramatic twists
you dislike subdued pacing
you prefer romances with clear, conventional resolution
you need a film with broad comedy or spectacle
Overview
The Lunchbox is a beautifully observed romance about two people who begin to matter to each other through notes, routine, and the ache of being overlooked. Ritesh Batra turns a simple mistaken delivery into something poignant and alive, finding warmth in the rhythms of Mumbai and sadness in the spaces between people.
Worth noting
Irrfan Khan gives the film its most affecting current: a man who has learned to live inside his own loneliness until a stranger’s words start to reopen him. Nimrat Kaur matches him with a performance that feels delicate but never fragile, capturing frustration, hope, and quiet longing with precision.
Bottom line
What lingers is the film’s emotional honesty. It understands that connection can be transformative even when it remains incomplete, and that the most romantic thing may be being truly seen. The ending is bittersweet, but it feels earned rather than manipulative.
Top Letterboxd reviews
Rida (4★) · 2226 likes
There is a scene in The Lunchbox in which the protagonist peers at a display of apparently identical paintings only to realize that each painting is minutely different: the building and road is the same, but the people are always different. He even recognizes himself in one of the paintings, or thinks he does, and purchases it and hugs it to his chest during the commute home.
The Lunchbox is like one of those paintings. Mumbai is always the same:… more
Brighid (5★) · 1385 likes
sometimes your heart aches so softly you stop noticing it after a while
sofyan (4.5★) · 935 likes
The wrong train can take you to the right station.
- Love it.- Love it. - And really love it.
Vonny Simarmata (4.5★) · 853 likes
In my head Saajan and Ila are happily together.
ANGELIKA (4.5★) · 652 likes
how can such a heartwarming film bring so much heartache at its ending?