From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
A Complicated Surgery Will Take Place on the Beach Tonight (Hindi film, 2021)
For other regional and language-specific adaptations, see A Complicated Surgery Will Take Place on the Beach Tonight (films).
The 2021 Hindi-language film **Raat Bhar Chikitsa** (*Surgery Through the Night*), directed by Asha Mohan, reimagines Beach Surgery as an urban-rural journey through contemporary India, following Mira, a paramedic in Delhi's informal medical undergrounds, and Arjun, an engineer recovering from conflict-zone trauma, as they move from the city's margins into the Rajasthani desert interior. The film preserves Leif's three temporary injuries — blindness from caustic trauma, paralysis from prior wounding, and an external cardiac monitor — but grounds them within India's fractured healthcare systems and industrial violence.
Mohan's formal strategy inverts temporality to mirror the glitch: Half Two scenes (the desert) appear to precede Half One (Delhi), suggesting the cycle running backward. The centrepiece — a pirate medical radio tower broadcasting corrective frequencies that "straighten" Arjun's doubled vision — becomes a site of underground resistance, linking surgical care to anti-surveillance networks. The soundtrack incorporates wind-recordings from rural power-transmission sites, creating a layered frequency language distinct from dialogue.
Critical response divided sharply. Indian film journals praised the film's formal refusal of closure and its grounding in medical precarity; postcolonial scholars contested whether Mira's refusal ethics survive to the film's final embrace of acceptance. [citation needed] Theatrical prints from Venice and subsequent festival circuits remain difficult to recover; current archival status is ██ .