There’s a short scene in “All We Imagine as Light” in which a lonely woman cradles a rice cooker, and everything that has come before in this transcendent movie suddenly shifts, your perceptions included. In this one crystallizing moment, the woman’s yearning, desire that has been discreetly waiting in the background, rushes into view. In fewer than two minutes, she transforms from a character whom you have just begun to know into one who — by virtue of her longing and aching vulnerability — has immediately taken up residence in your heart.

       The woman, Prabha (Kani Kusruti), works as a nurse in a Mumbai hospital along with a younger nurse, Anu (Divya Prabha), and an older cook, Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam). Prabha, who seems to be in her late 30s, is reserved, industrious, solicitous, with a gentle, no-nonsense bedside manner and a husband abroad whom she hasn’t seen in a very long time. She has a melancholic smile and large, deep-set eyes that often focus inward, which makes her seem lost in thought. She’s rooted in her life, yet when her gaze wanders she looks like she’s being pulled away from her everyday concerns by internal struggles.

       Written and directed by Payal Kapadia, “All We Imagine as Light” centers on Prabha during a quietly fraught period. Anu, who’s also her roommate, is having an affair with a young man, a relationship that she’s trying and failing to keep hidden. Other nurses have started to gossip about Anu, including to Prabha, who briskly and perhaps protectively dismisses the chatter. At the same time, Prabha is also trying to help Parvaty, who’s widowed, find a legal way to stay in the apartment she lived in with her husband. “That’s life,” a character says early on. “You better get used to impermanence.”

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       “All We Imagine as Light” doesn’t have a strong narrative. Instead, things happen much as they do in life, in fits and starts, and the movie’s themes and ideas surface in conversational bits and in seemingly disconnected pieces. It isn’t always clear how these various elements work together, though in time clusters of ideas form regarding women, marriage, sex, loss, loneliness and love. In one scene, Anu advises an overwhelmed mother on birth control; in another, Anu and Prabha learn that their cat is pregnant. Every person and object resonates with meaning that, like pieces of a mosaic, contributes to the overall picture.

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       A scene from “All We Imagine as Light.”

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       A sequence from the drama directed by Payal Kapadia.CreditCredit...Sideshow and Janus Films

       There are two separate scenes in “All We Imagine as Light,” roughly nine minutes apart, in which Prabha gets out of bed at night during a rainstorm. On the first occasion, she wakes, then glances at a rice cooker that had arrived earlier with no return address or note. The only clue to its sender are the words “Made in Germany.” “Doesn’t your husband live there?” Anu had asked Prabha, who didn’t answer. Prabha is a quiet, private woman. Now, though, in the dark, she reveals a side of herself (to you, at least) by reading a poem from a male admirer, a doctor, as she sits before an open window, her body framed by the velvety black night.

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