Some things just don’t make it out alive. A song you started on a bad night and never finished. A letter that sat in your drafts for months. A film that got made, properly made, starring two people who would go on to become legends, and then somehow vanished before a single person outside the crew ever got to see it. A short-film with Irrfan Khan and Vidya Balan in it, no less. Together. In the same frame. Gone before the world even knew it existed.
Most of the time, those things stay gone. That’s just life.
But sometimes, and I mean rarely, something crawls back.
That’s what happened with The Last Tenant. It popped up on YouTube this week and honestly, if you scroll past it, you’re doing yourself a disservice. Because this isn’t just some random old film somebody dug up. This is Irrfan Khan and Vidya Balan, together, in the only film they ever made with each other. Shot 25 years ago. Never released. Nearly destroyed. And somehow, impossibly, still here.
Let that sink in for a second.
The story of how it even survived is almost as interesting as the film itself. Sarthak Dasgupta, the guy who wrote and directed it, had just quit his corporate job back then. Engineering degree, MBA, the whole thing, and he walked away from it to make films. The Last Tenant was his first shot at it. They made the film, wrapped everything up, and then the footage went missing. One tape got lost completely. The other one was so covered in fungus it was basically garbage. No digital backups, because this was that era, the era where you didn’t think about digital backups because digital backups weren’t really a thing yet.
So Dasgupta did what anyone would do. He moved on. Forgot about it. Buried it somewhere in the back of his mind and got on with his life.
Then a few weeks ago he was shifting houses, going through boxes, probably cursing himself for owning so much stuff, and he found a VHS tape. That tape. And just like that, 25 years later, the film existed again.
Now here’s the part where it gets genuinely emotional.
Vidya Balan watched it the other night. First time she’d seen it since she shot it, which means she was watching her own younger self for the very first time, and doing it while knowing that the man beside her on screen is no longer here. She wrote about it on Instagram and honestly it didn’t read like something a publicist typed up. It read like something a real person wrote at midnight after feeling too many things at once.
She talked about what that time in her life actually looked like behind the scenes. Because we tend to see actors at the top and forget there was a bottom. For Vidya, that bottom was rough. Her first Malayalam film, Chakram, got shelved before it released. Then she started getting replaced. Not once, not twice. Almost twelve times over three years. Twelve films that cast her and then didn’t. That is a specific kind of rejection that would break most people, the kind where you’re good enough to get the part but somehow still end up without it.
She said she wanted to forget that whole period. That she shoved it under the carpet on purpose and kept moving.
But one thing stuck. One memory she couldn’t quite get rid of.
She remembered calling her sister from the set, excited, genuinely excited, not because she’d finally caught a break but because she was standing next to Irrfan Khan. The Irrfan Khan from Banegi Apni Baat. That was the whole reason for the call. That was the big news. She thought he was the most natural actor she’d ever seen in her life. And then she watched the film last week, all these years later, and thought the exact same thing. Her words were: “never a false note or tone.”
Six words. Best review he’s ever going to get.
And that’s the thing about Irrfan that no one has ever really been able to properly explain. He didn’t act like he was acting. There was no visible effort, no moment where you caught him working. He just showed up and was the character, completely, without any of the seams showing. Other actors who worked with him noticed it immediately. Audiences felt it even if they couldn’t name it. It was just something he had, and it was entirely his own.
He passed away in April 2020. And six years later it still doesn’t sit right. It’s one of those losses that the film industry hasn’t really recovered from, not fully, because there genuinely was nobody like him and there still isn’t.
So watching a restored VHS copy of a film from 25 years ago, grainy and imperfect, with a young Irrfan doing exactly what he always did, effortlessly and completely, it’s a lot. It really is.
Vidya also mentioned that there were other films over the years that should have brought them back together. Projects that almost happened and then didn’t. She said she grieved those missed chances after he died. But now, at least, she has The Last Tenant. This one small, quiet, barely-survived film where they shared a frame at the very beginning of everything.
The film itself follows a troubled musician who takes shelter in an abandoned house before eventually leaving the country. Simple story. Small scale. Nothing flashy about it. But that almost makes it more fitting, doesn’t it. Because neither of them were flashy at the start. They were just two people in front of a camera, figuring things out, not yet knowing what their careers would eventually look like.
Dasgupta released it through his company The Salt Inc. as a tribute to Irrfan on his death anniversary. Within three days it had nearly two lakh views on YouTube. Two lakh people found a 25-year-old film that almost didn’t exist. That’s not nothing. That’s actually kind of beautiful.
Go watch it. It’s free, it’s on YouTube, and it’ll probably make you feel something you weren’t expecting to feel on a random Thursday. Sometimes the things that nearly got lost end up meaning the most. This one definitely does.
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Sana has been covering film, fame, and everything in between for over a decade. From red carpets to rehab rumors, she brings nuance, wit, and an insider’s edge to every story. When she’s not reporting, she’s probably watching Koffee With Karan reruns or doom-scrolling celebrity IG feeds.
