‘Second Chance’ Review: A Soothing Mantra of Himalayan Hope and Healing

variety.com:

Jessica Kiang It’s hard to get a cellphone signal, up in the high mountains of Himachal Pradesh in Northern India. Especially in the dead of winter when deep snowdrifts absorb all sound and jagged encircling ridges form an impenetrably icy barrier.

But without WiFi coverage, Subhadra Mahajan’s spectacular and serene “Second Chance” suggests, a different, deeper kind of connection is possible — to these stark, unearthly landscapes, to the people who’ve made their lives among them, and perhaps even to the self you might have lost touch with through trauma or tiredness, down in the busy, noisy world below.

25-year-old Nia (Dheera Johnson) is certainly feeling estranged from herself when she takes refuge here. In a startling juxtaposition, we cut from a black screen over which audio of an anguished voicemail plays, to Nia gazing out over a stunning black-and-white vista of mountain crags rearing up monumentally from a frozen valley basin.

Having taken abortion pills — a secret she’s desperate to keep from her parents — Nia, queasy and lonely after her boyfriend’s abandonment, has come to her family’s summer home in the Pir Panjal mountain range to recuperate, knowing that winter is setting in and no one will be here but the caretaker Raju (Rajesh Kumar) and his family.