Summary
A saffron-robed anchorite, flickering like a heat-hallucination above the Ganges, liquefies into thin air and rematerializes inside a Dresden laboratory where copper coils, glass beakers and a young idealist’s certainty about Newtonian physics are all about to shatter. The sage’s vanishing act is no parlor trick: it is a moral earthquake, a rift between colonial awe and Teutonic hubris, between the karma of centuries and the patent application of tomorrow. Each disappearance leaves a trail of incense and ozone; each reappearance peels another layer from the inventor’s self-regard until the very notion of visibility—of being seen, of seeing—becomes a punishment. The film loops through Calcutta bazaars, Alpine fog and Expressionist corridors where shadows outnumber bodies, until the two rivals face one another inside a prism of light that refracts not only their bodies but the entire imperial century.
An Indian mystic uses his power of invisibility to scare a young inventor.
