The Canadian drama Calorie is the kind of unsuccessful film that I don’t love writing about. In so many respects, writer-director Eisha Marjara’s film is admirable and respectable. It’s made with a lot of heart and personal passion. It’s a female driven story of loss, regret, and familial bonds told from a cultural perspective not often seen on screen. It’s touching upon big issues with a sense of delicacy and grace. And still, it’s not a particularly great movie; one where the jarring shortcomings often outweigh the positives, making for something that’s tougher to watch than it should be. Calorie is precisely the kind of film that can make someone in my position feel bad for not liking it more than they do.
Monika Singh (Ellora Patnaik) is a recently divorced, Sikh-Canadian architect at a crossroads in her life. She’s overwhelmed and under-appreciated at work. Her thirteen year old daughter, Alia (Shanaya Dhillon-Birmhan), has become troublingly obsessed with her body image, counting calories, skipping meals, and maintaining a rigid workout regiment. Her seventeen year old daughter, Simi (Ashley Ganger), is budding singer, head over heels in love with a boy, and quick to remind mom that the second she turns eighteen, she’s leaving the house for good. The family has plans to spend the summer in India, visiting their Uncle Mohan (screen legend Anupam Kher) and Auntie Gurdeep (Dolly Ahluwalia), but a work emergency means mom has to send the kids on their own. Alia and Simi have never been to Indian before, and their set-in-stone ways run afoul of a major case of culture shock. The trip will further drive a wedge between mother and her daughters when the kids learn that Monika has been keeping a specific, painful trauma out of sight and lying to them about it. At home and once she eventually gets to India to finally spend time with her understandably upset daughters, Monika will have to bring that darkness into the light for the sake of maintaining her family’s mental health.
Calorie is something that’s clearly personal for Marjara. She’s a Sikh-Canadian, and a lot of the issues at the heart of Calorie are ones that hit home for the filmmaker. The trauma Monika is shielding from her kids is the death of her mother in the 1985 Air India bombings, and Marjara has a personal connection to the Flight 182 tragedy. Marjara takes great pains at examining not only the tremendous feeling of loss during one of the most devastating terrorist acts to impact Canadians, but also the lives lost during the Indian government’s deadly Operation Blue Star, which occurred at an iconic and revered temple in the film’s chosen setting of Amritsar. On top of those loaded topics, Marjara also revisits other personal traumas and works from her past, by giving one of the primary characters an eating disorder, a topic the director previously covered in her short film Am I the Skinniest Person You’re Ever Seen?.
The problem with Calorie doesn’t lie with the film’s sentiment, but rather with the script and execution. Marjara’s dialogue, while effective at getting a point across, is clumsy and inorganic, forcing the performers to give some rather odd line readings at times. The entire point of Calorie is to illustrate the effects of generational trauma, but Marjara has imbued the film with more than it can handle in a short, but sluggishly paced period of time. Some plot threads (most notably Simi’s struggles to adapt and a budding friendship from a young, gay Sikh who stops some creepy guys from hitting on her) are undeveloped to a point of feeling abandoned. Auntie Gurdeep’s sunny disposition and unwillingness to acknowledge problems isn’t looked into very much. Monika’s struggles to balance her work and familial duties are basic and unsurprisingly handled. And as much as Alia’s body image issues are personal in nature to the filmmaker, they give nothing to Calorie except the title, an unsteady metaphor which is awkwardly and clumsily explained during the odd fitting coda.
On their own, each of the performers do a fine job, particularly Patnaik and Kher, but it’s hard to make Marjara’s on-the-nose and frequently literal dialogue sound polished and natural. The performers also show a lack of chemistry between one another, with the veteran actors on screen unable to elevate their younger counterparts to their level. Each actor is doing technically sound work, but they all feel like they’re being directed differently and inhabiting a movie that exists in their heads individually. The emotions at the heart of Calorie are honest, but nothing about the story and script are gelling in the way Marjara probably hopes they would be.
Visually, Calorie does a terrific job of showcasing India as a cultural melting pot, full of life and vibrancy, and it’s clear that Marjara wants to approximate something grand with a modest budget. A treacly score doesn’t do much to enhance the material, underscoring the obvious emotional beats with a bland, obvious accompaniment. The production values throughout are on par with a made for television effort, but it’s always apparent that Marjara has a good eye when it comes to setting a scene, even if the staging something leaves a bit to be desired.
Calorie comes to life in its latter stages, once Monika arrives in India to see the rest of the family and people have to start confronting their feelings instead of repressing them. The more fiery content allows the actors to dig a bit deeper inside themselves, and the conflict promised by Marjara’s set up is followed through on via some wonderful one-on-one confrontations between family members. But even in these more assured moments of performance and direction, the dialogue and scattered pacing continue to hamper Calorie to the very end.
Calorie is the kind of misfire that I’m loathe to talk about, not because it’s unbearably awful, but because the intent to make something deeply personal is evident at every turn. This isn’t the kind of project that’s made with cynical intentions or bankrolled by someone trying to make a quick buck. It’s made by someone with a story to share and the best of intentions. It’s the type of movie that I want to treat with kindness, even though I don’t think it’s successful or consistent enough to recommend it.
Calorie opens at Carlton Cinemas in Toronto on Friday, November 28, 2025.
