How do you define happiness? Bhutan, primed to be the happiest country in the world, invented the Gross National Happiness Index in the 1970s to measure just that. Today, 40-year-old Amber is one of the many government agents tasked with travelling across Bhutan to assess the levels of contentment of its citizens, even as he struggles to find a sliver of happiness in his own life. As Amber embarks on a cross-country road trip with a colleague, Agent of Happiness reveals itself to be an ingenious, absorbing ethnographic portrait of a society reeling under the weight of its own loneliness.

Over its 94-minute runtime, Arun Bhattarai and Dorottya Zurbó introduce viewers to subjects who lay bare their insecurities, fears, and desires openly, allowing the documentary to scrutinise the many ways a country can abandon its people. Even when the filmmakers tackle darker themes that slowly acquire a political edge, Agent of Happiness rarely sermonises, instead choosing to capture the state of a nation with remarkable precision and a sense of humour. In that, it has all the makings of a crowd-pleaser—a deeply felt ode to the beauty and fragility of the human condition that refuses to reduce a population to government-sanctioned numbers.

- Poulomi Das