Shortly thereafter, we’re introduced to Mohammad, Nadeem, and Salik, operators of a wildlife rescue focused on treating and rehabilitating black kites that fall from New Delhi’s toxic skies. What makes All That Breathes hit a bit differently is that it doesn’t explain who these men are or what they do. We discover the particulars of their lives organically, as they come up in conversation or in the course of their day-to-day lives. We witness phone conversations, only half of which can be heard. We’re privy to private discussions about the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act and the resulting government overreach without any mention of the Citizenship Amendment Act by name.

The filmmakers, in other words, don’t dot every “i” and cross every “t” because they don’t need to. You pick up from context what’s important—at least what’s important to the subjects of the film.

Scenes of family life and the work of the aptly named Wildlife Rescue are interspersed with a good number of the purely cinematic experiential sequences of the sort that open the film, all of which seem designed to make the viewer reflect on the way wildlife affects cities and cities affect wildlife and both affect humans. The beauty of it is, though, we’re not told how to interpret any of this. We don’t need to be. The images coming straight out of the camera are enough of a prompt.

Those images, by the way, were obviously captured at a higher resolution and with more dynamic range than we find in the HD presentation on HBO Max. The film was shot on a combination of Canon and Panasonic prosumer cameras, both of which record at 4K resolution with 10-bit dynamic range. And you can see the constraints of dynamic range at times, when highlights get blown out or shadows get a little muddied. All in all, though, the impeccably composed cinematography benefits from a bit of processing that seems to have muted contrasts a bit, and the footage is so mesmerizing that it transcends reproduction.

No such caveats are needed for the Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 soundtrack, which is an absolute master class in subtle but effective audio mixing. In fact, it upmixes perfectly into Atmos, if your surround processor is capable of such. Pans across the front soundstage are common, though inconspicuous enough that you might miss them. The surround channels are nearly constantly active but never distracting. Dialogue is beautifully rendered—although, it’s in Hindi, so intelligibility might not matter for those of us in the west who don’t speak the language. The baked-in subtitles are nicely done as well and seem better suited to viewing at cinematic proportions than the standard 55-inch TV on the other side of the room. That’s a nice but unexpected touch.

Overall, the only real complaint I have about All That Breathes is that it ends far too quickly. Granted, the 97-minute runtime already seems brisk on paper, but actually watching it, it doesn’t feel anywhere near that long. Some of that is due to the lack of a conventional narrative but a lot of it boils down to fantastic editing, compelling subjects, and mesmerizing cinematography. One simply hopes HBO eventually releases the thing in UHD/HDR so it can be experienced in its full splendor.