A documentary by Jillian Elizabeth and Neil Dalal. In English, Tamil, and Sanskrit, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable.

Gurukulam shows you what it’s like to retreat for months to a remote ashram, and not always in a good way.

Jillian Elizabeth and Neil Dalal choose to shoot their film in a fly-on-the-wall, impressionistic manner that, while immersing you in the lush, bucolic surrounds of south India’s Arsha Vidya Gurukulam, shows little concern for narrative enlightenment.

The film opens with the predawn waking-up of the Hindu spiritual centre, students and staff sweeping steps, cracking coconuts, and picking blossoms before the hypnotic group chants start echoing throughout the facility and competing with the chorus of tropical birdsong. It puts you right there and it’s intriguing.

Unfortunately, much of the rest of the wandering verité essay focuses on the quotidian chores and rituals of the place, from the prolonged dolloping-out of spoonfuls of rice and dal at lunchtime to the hours spent listening to the late, orange-robed Swami Dayananda Saraswati make pronouncements like “What is self-evident is self-existent” and “Saying is only an expression of what you see” to rooms full of cross-legged students. Time travels at a different pace here.

Gurukulam’s most illuminating moments come in brief, unsustained interviews with students, the most in-depth with a former American psychology prof who has spent more than a decade at the facility, shirking her strict Catholic past for the “more logical” belief in our divine interconnection. There are a French Muslim businessman, a young Brit, and a Japanese yogi here too, but very little insight into what brought them or, more importantly, what keeps them here.

The threads are so disjointed, and the spiritual teachings are given so little context, that it’s unlikely this doc will inspire you to toss your worldly belongings and run off to a retreat anytime soon.