Tumbbad: Money - The Cause Of (And Solution To) All Of Life’s Problems

Myths, fables, and fairytales are fertile ground for horror. They’re often instructional stories, intended to provide an explanation for how something came to be or to teach important moral lessons. And one way to teach important moral lessons is to scare the shit out of your audience. But over time, they get sanitized, turned into something harmlessly entertaining that we can tell our children without giving them nightmares. I’m not saying that we should be trying to traumatize our children, but it doesn’t take much to scratch off the bright, colorful sheen of a story like Hansel and Gretel and reveal something far grimmer underneath.

This is the wavelength on which Tumbbad operates. It’s an evocative dark fantasy about the corrosive effects of greed, and as someone not especially conversant in Indian mythology, it’s got some really haunting moments that aren’t like anything else I’ve seen.

It begins with the goddess of prosperity, from whom all food and riches flow, giving birth to 160 million gods at the birth of the universe. Beloved above all others was her firstborn, Hastar. But Hastar was greedy, and wanted all of the food and riches for himself. He took all of the gold, but was stopped before he could take all of the food. The goddess refused to let him be destroyed for his sin, but decreed that no temple would even be built to Hastar. He would be a forgotten god. And so his name faded from memory, the subject of no worship, no praise, no stories.

Until someone in the village of Tumbbad found the old stories, found his name, and dedicated a temple to Hastar.

This prologue gives way to India in 1918, and a woman who is mistress to a wealthy old man named Sarkar. She has endured Sarkar’s attention for many years because she has two children to feed, and Sarkar has promised her a gold coin, worth enough to take care of her and her children. He dangles the promise of it like a carrot, assuring her that one day, someday, it would be hers. But that day keeps on failing to come, and in the meantime, she has another responsibility. There is an old, old woman. A woman who must be fed and kept placated. A woman who is kept chained in a room, in the depths of a crumbling, decaying castle, in what used to be a village called Tumbbad.

A woman who has been alive - if that’s what you can call it - for a very, very long time. A woman with the secret to Sarkar’s wealth.

One night, an accident leaves Sarkar’s mistress with only one remaining son and no desire to take care of this very old woman anymore. Her surviving son, Vinayak, is a curious, restless sort, unsatisfied with their meager living, sure that Sarkar will never give up that gold coin to his mother. But when Sarkar dies, the gold coin is indeed hers. And the first thing Vinayak wants to know is where they can find more. But his mother makes him promise to never, ever return to Tumbbad. But as an adult, he does, with the inevitability of fate. There’s something there, and it makes Vinayak - otherwise scraping by as an errand boy to a shady local businessman - a rich man. His fortunes improve, he becomes an important local figure, he marries, he starts a family. All the while concealing the terrible cost, the terrible risks he must take to ensure his prosperity.

(Come to think of it, this film has a bit in common with Incantation in that respect. Though Incantation is much more a straight-up horror film, they both feature old, forbidden gods, cursed villages, and the idea that blessings and curses are sort of two sides of the same coin.)

It’s a story based in folklore, so the imagery isn’t your stock-standard horror fare, with a number of striking set pieces and a strong sense of atmosphere throughout. It’s a story of forgotten gods, cursed villages, and the terrible things people are willing to do for money. Tumbbad is a crumbling ruin, perpetually drenched in rainfall, the castle at its center a tangle of stone chambers with dirt floors illuminated fitfully by torchlight. The visuals do a lot of the work here, consistently strong and drawing on traditions you don’t see a lot of in the West. There’s always the danger of exoticizing things, but one of the things I appreciate about horror from other countries is the novelty, to me at least, of the imagery and cultural assumptions driving the films. I don’t know how rooted in actual Hindu mythology the story is, but it works well, putting a fresh and surprising spin on ideas that are themselves not necessarily new. So there’s a fairytale aspect to it, but the fairytale in its original, non-sanitized form, where the moral is taught in blood and sacrifice and fire.

It's a story that spans a period of almost 30 years, from a mother’s duty and a childhood tragedy to a father’s debt and its cost being everything, all set to the backdrop of an India in the process of gaining its independence. It’s a world in flux, and we see things changing right in front of us. The old ways being bulldozed and paved over by the new. Vinayak isn’t especially sympathetic - from a very young age he’s obsessed with the existence of a treasure rumored to lie under Tumbbad and it warps him into a man comfortable with corruption. You get the sense that the promise of this treasure has this effect on anyone it touches - Sarkar holds it over Vinayak’ mother’s head for years, and Vinayak grows into a complacent man contemptuous of Indian independence and social change. And Pandurang, Vinayak’s oldest son, never really stands a chance in this regard. He is his father’s son, and his ambition exceeds even that of his father, as the young and headstrong so often do. The more money you have, the easier it is to see it as the solution to everything and Pandurang learns this far too early.

It tells its story economically, with an effective use of montage and repeated sequences to indicate the passage of time, and it's moody as hell, full of rainswept vistas, crowded villages and torchlit ruins, and places far stranger than that. For most of its running time, it’s located very much in the real world, concerned with Vinayak’s meteoric rise in an India that’s in the middle of tremendous change. But this makes the moment where it taps into something more mysterious and otherworldly that much more effective. It’s a world where bribes and backroom deals are just a car ride away from something much older and darker. And when it is concerned with the older, darker parts of India, the visual effects are surprisingly solid given how ambitious they are. The story plays fair as well - even the most unsympathetic characters never descend to the level of two-dimensional villainy. They’re driven by very human flaws, and seem to be aware of just how precarious their situation is. Vinayak’s wife doesn’t know what he has to do to keep the family in the lifestyle to which they’ve become accustomed, and though she’s curious, she doesn’t press that hard, as if part of her really doesn’t want to know.

There are, perhaps, some pacing issues, insofar as the film starts strong and then bogs down a little in the middle as the focus shifts from the nightmarish secrets hidden in cursed villages to the life of a man who doesn’t seem to have any problem with wealth, but then, as we get just the briefest glimpse of what he has to do to get it, it all becomes much clearer and things begin to pick back up from there. A long time ago, the people of Tumbbad did something forbidden, and the results are both a curse and a blessing for anyone who dares to brave its depths.

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