It's not hard to spot where Tanim Noor's Utshob nods to Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol. The connections are too specific to ignore. But this isn't just a modern remake with Bangladeshi flavour, it's something else. Something more rooted.
Instead of chilly Victorian London and flickering candlelight, Noor sets the story in the heart of Mohammadpur, where tangled wires and tired buildings conceal decades of unspoken stories. This is no Dickensian snow globe. It's a city still spinning, and sometimes stumbling, under its weight.
The man at the centre, Jahangir, isn't exactly Scrooge, but it's hard not to draw lines between them. He's sour, disconnected, and quietly cruel in a hundred everyday ways.
He blocks out music, mistreats animals, turns away orphans, and steals power with a shrug. It's not evil, just deeply selfish. That might be worse. And like Scrooge, he doesn't notice the silence he's creating around himself—until the night before Eid, when something finally cracks open.
Unlike Dickens's ghosts draped in chains and mist, Utshob gives us something more grounded, yet just as unsettling.
The past plays out on a cinema screen at Madhumita Hall. Jahangir sits there, watching himself, watching his younger years unfold in 1980s Rajshahi.
Interestingly, the film employs Dhaka's more familiar urban tone rather than the expected Rajshahi dialect. While some might see it as a departure, it could also be read as an artistic choice, a way of making those memories feel more universally accessible.
Rather than narrowing the audience to a specific region, Noor opens the emotional memory to all, allowing tone and sentiment to take precedence over linguistic accuracy.
What A Christmas Carol shares with Utshob is more than structure—it's the ache of hindsight. Dickens used ghosts to shame and awaken.
Noor uses memory and regret. The ghosts don't scare Jahangir into goodness. They wear him down. They make him see. And what he sees is a man who's slowly closed off every window to joy. The transformation isn't flashy. It's slower, heavier. But it sticks.
Dickens made Scrooge soften into a state of generosity and joy. Noor's approach is more restrained. Jahangir doesn't start singing or dancing. He starts noticing. He helps. He listens. He shares. In a way, this quiet version of redemption feels more believable.
One thing Utshob does differently—and maybe better—is that it never lets one character own the screen. Everyone matters. Even with only 108 minutes, the film gives each figure enough space to land.
Jesmin, especially, glows. Sadia Ayman plays her young version with a kind of tired warmth—she's juggling dreams and duties, like most young women from mid-sized cities. Her chemistry with young Jahangir feels real. Playful, sharp, and just soft enough to hurt when it fades.
There's something quietly satisfying about the way the film looks and sounds.
It doesn't grab attention with flashy tricks—instead, the camera moves functionally, almost like it's sketching out a memory rather than just capturing a moment.
This feels close to how some thinkers describe perception—not just seeing but piecing together moments from past and present.
The film trusts that, with its gentle pans and careful framing, it follows the flow of thought rather than rushing the story.
The music fits right in. That remix of "Romjaner Oi Rojar Sheshe" isn't just an update—it's like the song is waking up, speaking fresh again.
There's an old idea that music builds feelings the way buildings hold space, and this film taps into that. Layers of sound, voices, and familiar tunes create an emotional map that pulls the audience into places they didn't even realise they remembered.
Altogether, the way the film utilises sight and sound feels like a quiet reflection on how memory, emotions, and tradition coexist, not locked in place, but constantly shifting.
Dickens and Noor don't beat around the bush when it comes to what they want to say. They go straight for the heart of it.
In Utshob, especially near the end, the message comes through clearly and firmly—perhaps even a little too clearly. But instead of feeling heavy-handed, it reads more like the film is making sure we don't miss what matters. There's something kind in that. And crucially, neither story cuts corners. They're not pretending people wake up one day and become someone new. What they're both doing is reminding us that real change is hard, yes, but not impossible, and it's worth trying and trying counts.
At their heart, both A Christmas Carol and Utshob are about people forgetting how to care—and then remembering, piece by painful piece. Scrooge's grave and Jahangir's empty Eid prep are just symbols. What matters is that they both look up, finally, and ask themselves, "What have I done with my time here?"
If one pulls in a little theory and it's hard not to, then writers like Raymond Williams (Culture and Society), Bakhtin (Rabelais and His World), and Terry Eagleton (The Ideology of the Aesthetic) come to mind.
They've all written about how stories shape values. Utshob is full of that. Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism also helps, especially in understanding Eid as a space of collective meaning, much like Christmas in Dickens.
The ghosts also have something of Todorov's "fantastic" in them, not quite magic, not quite metaphor. Barthes's Camera Lucida explains the way memories hit harder when visualised.
Homi Bhabha's Location of Culture provides a framework for understanding why this hybrid storytelling is a part of cinema and part of memory, which is worth paying attention to.
The film subtly introduces a powerful idea: life doesn't revolve around just one person. No one gets to hold the spotlight for long.
This aligns with Simone de Beauvoir's view that identity forms through relationships, and Martin Buber's belief that meaning emerges in shared moments.
Utshob reflects this by shifting attention away from Jahangir alone, giving space to everyone around him. Each character—no matter how briefly seen—feels essential.
The film doesn't shout this message; it lets it sink in slowly. What unfolds is less a story about one man and more a shared experience of interconnected, imperfect lives.
Utshob ends not with grand answers, but with a quiet hope—that caring again, even a little, is still possible.
raiyanjuir@gmail.com
