Partition surely produced people who were frightened, generous, selfish, cowardly, cruel and unexpectedly courageous, sometimes all at once. Here, everyone appears to have been handed a job description. There's the good Muslim, the bad Muslim, the bad Hindu, the victim, the mother, the saviour, the predator, the poet and the conscience-keeper. Ali Fazal, as the poet, gets that last job and fares better than most, but even he is required to carry the burden of articulating what the film wants us to think about humanity.