Gaia: Getting Lost In The Forest

Sometimes, you think you know what you’re in for when you go into a movie and it ends up being something else - either in a sly subversion of the premise or what is just a hard swerve out of nowhere. There’s something appealing to me about going into something with expectations that get firmly upended. You watch enough genre films, you’ll start to get a sense of what the beats are going to be. So anything that jolts me out of that is going to be welcome. At least, it will be when it’s done well, This is the biggest problem with Gaia. There’s a good, effective body-horror story in this film somewhere, and it’s a pity that that’s not the story it ultimately chooses to tell.

It opens on a vertiginous shot of a vast, unbroken expanse of forest that slowly upends itself in a way that is disorienting. It’s a good moment, really establishing a sense of nature as something alien and hallucinatory, but as one of those people who’s watched a lot of genre films, all I could think was “wow, drone shots are starting to turn into their own sort of cliché, aren’t they?”…before it cuts to someone in a canoe, on a river, flying a drone. Well-played, film, well-played.

There are two people in the canoe - Winston and Gabi. They’re rangers for the South African forestry service, out doing surveys, collecting footage from stationary cameras, making sure nothing’s amiss. Gabi’s piloting the drone and it’s about two kilometers out when it collides with something, or someone and loses signal. This isn’t good, it’s expensive equipment and they don’t want to leave their trash in the forest. Winston doesn’t want Gabi to go out alone - people disappear in these forests - but she insists she’ll be fine and won’t be gone long. Meanwhile, two figures dressed in handmade rags, covered in mud, move slowly through the forest. One of them has the drone strapped to his back. They smear mud of the lenses of the rangers’ cameras. They set booby traps in the forest.

People disappear in these forests.

Gabi discovers that the two mysterious figures are Barend and Stefan - father and son who have left the modern world behind to live off the grid in the forest. Not just living off of the land, worshipping the land. Specifically, a giant mycorrhizal network spanning the breadth of the forest. A vast, singular organism that, as Barend puts it, was old before apes even started dreaming of gods. It is ancient, huge, and its spores have a way of taking over those exposed to them, until none of their humanity is left. This is why they set traps, and Gabi is, effectively, trapped with them in their ramshackle cabin in the middle of the forest.

In ways both large and small, this film bears more than a bit of a resemblance to In The Earth - they take place in two very different parts of the world, in two very different cultural contexts, but both concern themselves with people who go into the forest for work and discover hermits living there, in the middle of something vast and strange at a point where nature becomes something entirely other. A vast fungal network underlying the forest is important in both cases, as are ideas about what our relationship to nature is or should be or even can be. Coincidentally, really unpleasant foot injuries are also key to both films. I don’t think it’s plagiarism or anything as much as convergence on common themes (both were written and made in the middle of COVID-19 lockdown, which was certainly fertile ground for malevolent-nature stories). And both have their shortcomings, but I think In The Earth comes out of the comparison better, because although Gaia has a lot of what you’d need for a good, visceral take on nature at its most indifferent and alien (something In The Earth largely forsakes for a more cerebral approach and a barrage of psychedelia), it decides instead that it primarily wants to be the story of the dynamic between Gabi, Barend and Stefan. And honestly, the characterization isn’t there to support it. It’s got all this other compelling stuff around parasitic plant life and body horror that it effectively relegates to the background by the halfway point. In The Earth, for its faults (mostly a messy ending), creates a mood of real tension and danger, mostly around the people in this strange landscape. This film squanders a vivid, more conventionally horror-based expression of that same landscape for what is effectively a relationship drama. And relationship dramas are fine, but it’s not what we came here for and the characters aren’t fleshed out enough for us to really care at that level.

And it sucks, because it really is a vividly told story when it’s good. Microphotographic shots of plants and time-lapse footage of sprouting fungi, floating spores and branching tendrils really work to sell the almost Lovecraftian otherness of the deep forest, and the ecosystem that holds sway out there, centered around a massive fungal presence that almost seems to breathe, makes for some really striking and unsettling body horror. It’s not entirely without precedent, but it’s definitely not your stock infection narrative - there’s a resemblance to some of the imagery from Annihilation (and the video game The Last Of Us, which is getting its own adaptation on HBO soon enough), but it isn’t really derivative. It’s less in the service of surrealism and more meant to unnerve us, which it does quite well. There’s an icky, visceral tactility to it because it takes things we see in nature all the time and puts them in contexts which make you sort of realize that yeah, something like this could very well be out there, waiting for us to delve too greedily and too deep, to burrow into our flesh and begin to sprout.

At least, when that’s the story and imagery that’s at the forefront of the film, which it is only fitfully, and in a way that doesn’t really sustain a sense of dread. This is another problem with the film - it’s got all the right parts, but they’re put together in a way that largely undercuts their impact. The film’s pitched in such a way that we’re supposed to think that Gabi only gradually realizes that Barend and Stefan might not be entirely benevolent, but it’s clear early on that they have their own agenda. Rather than gradually building to a reveal of just how far the fungal organism has spread and what it’s actually done to people and the forest, things that feel like major revelations are sort of dropped in here and there without a lot of buildup or sense of their importance, and though they’re moments that are impressive and still startling in and of themselves, they don’t really hang together because they’re seeded in between the development of a dynamic between Gabi and Barend and Stefan, and in the second half of the film, that seems to be what the filmmaker’s more interested in exploring. 

And there’s not much to explore there, as it turns out. Not that they’re cartoons (well, Barend starts getting there toward the end), just that we don’t know much about them one way or the other. It’s a very terse film in terms of dialogue, which is fine and for a story focused on the threat all around them that’d work well, but for a character and relationship study, it falls short. We don’t really know why Gabi makes some of the choices she does, Stefan is largely a cipher, almost a Tarzan to Gabi’s Jane, and Barend goes from having some potential depth to ranting fanatic, right on cue. There is, on the other hand, some interesting subtext with Barend, in that you have this highly educated Afrikaner rejecting modern civilization and presuming to go native and in the process decide that he in effect knows what’s best for humanity. Meanwhile, you’ve got African natives Gabi and Winston, working to preserve the land that Barend’s decided he understands better than everyone else. It echoes South African colonialism, and though it’s never explicitly addressed, I don’t think it needs to be. It might just be down to opportune casting, but it does give the film in whatever form it takes a little bite it otherwise wouldn’t have had.

There’s a lot of vivid, disturbing imagery, and to the extent that this is a monster movie, the designs are supremely creepy and the effects entirely believable. This is a film with a good sense of restraint about how and how long to keep creatures on camera, so the mystery’s never really dispelled. On the other hand, the filmmakers made the puzzling choice to locate as much of the horror in nightmare sequences as in actual happenings, even though they’re both pretty similar in imagery and outcome. Usually nightmare sequences are used to communicate some kind of oncoming dread in a way that violates our understanding of the real world, so it doesn’t make much sense for the nightmares to be of things that actually end up happening in the waking world. It feels redundant, and nightmares get used often enough that it starts to feel repetitive and tiresome. There’s one extended hallucination sequence (because, again, fungi and Mother Nature, it’s kind of the law) that, oddly enough, feels if anything a little pedestrian given what we’ve already seen elsewhere.

And finally, though the end of the story proper is a very evocative sequence, it feels sort of anticlimactic, and then there’s a coda that’s not just a “the end...OR IS IT?” cliché, but manages to be preachy in the process. I get wanting your film to Say Something, but I think one thing some filmmakers miss is that a very straightforward film is just as capable of that, if not more, than one where the filmmakers are consciously trying to communicate a message. That ends up being clumsy and didactic, as it is here, and so the film ends with kind of a thud.

The movie about the utter unknowability and mystery and indifference of nature, about how our bodies aren’t necessarily our own, that movie would have been a pretty straightforward monster film with some great almost Lovecraftian touches in malevolent nature. But trying to actively make points about mankind and nature and our relationship to each other and to nature and What It All Means just ends up feeling kind of callow and missing the mark. It certainly takes a hard swerve into the unexpected, just not in a way that’s at all satisfying.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu 

The Whole Truth: Too Much, All At Once

I have my biases, and one of them is for focused, elegantly constructed stories. Shit, given that we’re talking about scary movies, you could probably call a preference for an actual story a bias. Whether it’s a simple, cleanly executed premise or an elaborate clockwork of a thing, having a story that ticks along, hitting the notes it needs to hit when it needs to hit them, just feels satisfying to me. You don’t need gore, you don’t need creature effects, you don’t need a lot of screaming. With the right story, just a look or an open door or a well-placed shadow can be utterly frightening.

This is not, unfortunately, a lesson learned by the people who made The Whole Truth. It starts off promising, but gradually devolves into a mess as it tries to cram about three or four different stories together to the detriment of all of them.

Mai is a single mother with two teenage kids - her daughter Pim and her son Putt. Dad’s not in the picture, and nobody mentions him. Mai’s just gotten a promotion at work to head of international sales, which is awesome, Pim’s up for captain of her school’s cheerleading squad, and Putt…well, Putt is shy, disabled, gets bullied a lot, and has a “friend” named Fame who invites himself over to aggressively creep on Pim and threaten Putt with some sort of blackmail. Mai plans to go out with her kids to celebrate her promotion, but she gets stuck at work late - her new job means having to hang around for a long meeting with a major client. On her way home, she’s struck head-on by a drunk driver.

Now Mai is in the hospital, comatose. Her condition is stable, but the doctors only give her about a fifty-fifty chance of ever waking up again. So now Pim and Putt are effectively orphans, and in steps Mai’s father, Phong. He takes them into his care, bringing them back home, where they meet their grandmother, Wan. Pim and Putt don’t really know their grandparents very well - never visited them, didn’t really hear from them, and they’re not exactly the warmest people. Wan fusses over Pim a little, and…mistakes Putt for someone else. As it turns out, Wan suffers from dementia. Where she is, when it is, and who people are get fuzzy for her sometimes. And now it's up to Pim and Putt to make sure she gets her medication, and try not to upset her.

So, this is their life now when they aren’t in school. And soon enough, Pim and Putt start to notice things are a little off…Wan’s oddly insistent on Putt drinking all of his milk, some of the family photos are just empty frames, some have a person cut out of them. There’s a space on the wall where it’s clear something used to hang. And there’s a hole in the wall that appears to look into the living room of the neighboring house.

It’s always nighttime in that house. Even in the middle of the day.

The basic premise - two kids basically at the mercy of grandparents who don’t really know them, at least one of whom may not be in their right mind - has some promise if the story’s going to be more grounded. There’s real tension and unease in the prospect of being dependent on someone who isn’t really aware of what they’re doing. And a story about a family with deep, dark, hidden secrets (why haven’t they had any contact with their grandparents? Who’s the person missing from the photos?) can work right alongside that pretty easily. That’s even assuming everyone is who they claim to be. Separately, a story about a mysterious hole in the wall that sort of shows up one day and seems to offer a window into some other nightmare reality is, by itself, not a bad premise for a more explicitly supernatural story. But piling all of these three together puts too many ingredients in the pot all at once, not letting any of them develop as fully as they could because the movie’s juggling too much as it is. They’re all connected, in that there’s definitely a reason why Mai didn’t really stay in touch with her parents, it has something to do with the person missing from those photos, and whatever’s on the other side of that mysterious hole may be the key to it all. But it’s a lot, so the space you need to build up dread isn’t really there. If it isn’t one thing, it’s another. Early in the film, when you think it’s just going to be about these two kids being effectively trapped with people who say they’re their grandparents, but don’t seem especially affectionate or competent to care for them, there’s definitely something there. But it dissipates quickly in the face of all of the other moving parts.

And on top of all of that there are two other subplots, neither of which have a whole lot to do with the rest of the film. There’s one concerning drama and high-school intrigue around Pim’s place on the cheerleading squad and Fame’s whole predatory fixation on her, and another concerning Phong’s attempt to get at the truth behind the car accident that left Mai in a coma. They don’t really work to flesh out the characters or give them depth or even set up situations that drive the decisions they make later on, they’re just sort of there, padding out the run time without adding anything to the film, or at least not enough to justify the amount of time they take up. They don’t really end up being anything more than distractions. And I suspect the filmmakers were concerned about their audience being easily distracted, because this is not a film that does subtle at all. Not a moment goes by that isn’t punctuated by some kind of music sting or dramatic zoom or close-up. Nothing’s allowed to breathe or just happen in the background or the periphery of the action, which I think it potentially fatal to a movie like this, one that needs some amount of atmosphere to get over. The  more explicitly supernatural elements are pretty standard Asian-ghost stuff punctuated by some gross-out moments, none of which really land because they’re so obvious and so thoroughly forecasted. When someone looks in the hole, you know something bad is going to happen, so at that point it cannot even startle you. This film doesn’t build anything up, it just sort of flings stuff against the wall. And in case there’s any confusion, the characters are there to say out loud the stuff we’ve already figured out for ourselves.

A film like this (or at least one of the films this is like) works through revelation - what is the thing nobody wants to talk about, what happened on a particular night, stuff like that. Which is fine, and there is some of that, but there’s not a lot of mystery to it, it becomes perfunctory at best and convoluted at worst, everything coming to light in the last twenty or thirty minutes in a way that both restates the obvious and throws in some additional twists that, again, don’t really seem to add to the story, ending the whole thing on a note that I think is supposed to be creepily ambiguous but just ends up being confusing, yet again.

This is the kind of thing that happens when you don’t trust in your audience or in the strength of a single story, and the resulting mess tries to do a bunch of things and fails at all of them.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix 

Extremity: Buy The Ticket, Take The Ride

Another one of horror film’s time-honored traditions is stories of make-believe that goes too far. Maybe it’s a movie, or some kind of game, or more recently a reality show or an escape room, but what they have in common is the idea that something that’s being presented as simulated danger turns out to be real, actual danger. It’s an idea that’s easy to do badly, as films like The Task, Hellraiser 8, or The Houses October Built readily demonstrate. It’s a pretty simple premise - what if they’re being murdered for real? - and it’s often treated simplistically, starting and ending with the obvious. It’s the kind of film I’m likely to skip over, all other things being equal.

But as an example of this kind of story. Extremity avoids a lot of the cliches I was afraid it was going to fall into, and largely tells a story that finds tension in places other than the obvious and keeps you guessing. At least, until the third act, when one seriously wrongheaded narrative choice undoes a lot of the film’s goodwill and it limps to its end as something much less compelling. I’m not mad, just disappointed.

After a brief, cryptic scene of someone we can’t see possibly engaging in self-harm, the film opens with sensationalistic title cards and voiceovers about extreme haunt attractions, and how they’re totally unregulated with no safe words or supervision and how anything could happen in one, interspersed with ostensible footage from such haunts, with people being slapped around, covered in cockroaches, etc. You get the impression that this is going to be a movie about how some unsuspecting patrons are lured into some kind of snuff operation, and that threatens to be really boring.

But then the camera pulls back to reveal that what we’re seeing is a video that a young woman is watching on her phone. Her name is Allison Bell, and she’s applied (and selected) to be a participant in an extreme haunt (sometimes called “immersive horror experiences”) called Perdition. She receives instructions to drive to a building out in the middle of nowhere. Then she’s on the phone with someone else, presumably her girlfriend, who’s begging her not to go through with this. Allison assures her she knows what she’s doing, that this is something that she needs to do. Allison had some very bad things happen to her as a child, things maybe she’s never really gotten over. There have been suicide attempts. She’s obsessed with horror films - not your standard stuff, not like what I write about here, the real grimy underground stuff. The kind that sometimes gets confiscated by customs. She arrives at her destination, gets out of the car and dumps her medication out.

Allison wants to push herself as far as she can.

In retrospect, the opening scene sort of sets the thesis for the whole film. It’s not a complicated one - everything is not what it seems - but it’s handled well for the most part, and gets at the compelling thing about these sort of attractions, the degree to which the line between theater and reality blurs. And these sort of attractions do exist in real life, though the pearl-clutching about no safe words or regulations doesn’t seem to have much basis in fact. They’re money-making operations, and require publicity. They’re on the radar, so there are precautions. Guests have to sign extensive waivers of liability, health checks before admission are not uncommon, and there are most definitely safe words. It’s all because attractions like Blackout and McKamey Manor really do ride a line between haunted house, immersive theater, and BDSM scene. They are absolutely not for most people. And much of what we see of Perdition is very similar to what I know of those attractions, so it all feels plausible in that regard. It’s pretty grim - Allison and another participant, a guy named Zachary, find the releases they have to sign in the bathroom of the abandoned building and then begin the game by fishing something out of a toilet filled with actual shit.

This is the gist of this kind of experience: Once you’ve committed to it, once you’ve signed the release, you’re theirs. And it becomes clear very quickly that what Allison and Zachary imagine that is going to mean is very different from what the people running Perdition have in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride. It’s too late to get off now. The narrative, then, features a lot of interplay between what’s artifice and what’s real. Part of it is in how the story is told from multiple perspectives. The film bounces around between what’s happening in the present, flashbacks to Allison’s childhood, conversations with her therapist and a fraught life with her partner, along with the occasional dream sequence, and the perspective of a Japanese news crew there to document Perdition. So there’s what Allison and Zachary are enduring, what brought Allison here in the first place, and what’s going on behind the scenes. There’s a lot of perspective-juggling going on, but it’s all easy to follow. Anyone coming into this expecting a story about an extreme haunt where the make-believe is ALL TOO REAL or some shit like that is going to be disappointed. For most of its running time, this is more about the tension created when someone who is most likely very unstable puts themselves in a position where their already-fragile ability to cope is pushed to its limits, as well as what happens when you’re trying really hard to make your artistic endeavor a success and maybe you’re taking some chances you shouldn’t, or cutting some corners. It’s more of an accident-waiting-to-happen film, and that’s where a lot of the tension is.

And in that regard, it does a good job of keeping us on our toes - at any given time, it isn’t clear how much of what’s happening is really this attraction going off the rails and how much of it is theater, or to what degree Allison is decompensating or not. Just when you think you’ve gotten it figured out one way or another, it’ll throw something else in to wrong-foot you. There was one twist that I guessed pretty early on, but to the film’s credit, it took a long time to pay it off, which made it easier to believe that maybe it wasn’t coming after all. As the film moves on, we start to get a sense that everyone’s sort of got their own issues - Allison’s are obvious, but the person running Perdition is dealing with a lot behind the scenes, you get the sense that his motivations might not be the healthiest (though not in the way you’re probably thinking), leading to him breaking with protocol and overstepping boundaries, and his staff run the gamut from competent professionals to relatively untested amateurs, to people who seem quite possibly legitimately unhinged. So it’s a story where we’re getting a glimpse into all of the places where this could all fall apart, a confluence of the wrong people in the wrong place at the wrong time leading to avoidable tragedy. But it’s never (well, almost never) as simple as unsuspecting teens being lured to their doom.

Also to its credit, it has a great sense of setting and style - exteriors are snowy and rural, forests and the outskirts of town in what might be the Rust Belt, though it’s never made clear, interiors are suitably dank and decaying urban ruins, all lit in lurid funhouse reds and blues and purples, as befits the nature of Perdition. It’s one of the few times the abandoned hospital aesthetic doesn’t seem like a cliché to me precisely because Perdition is leaning into that aesthetic like any horror attraction would, and it looks quite real. There’s sort of a late 70s/early 80s grindhouse scuzz to it in places without it ever feeling like pastiche. The soundtrack is ominous synthesizer, shrieking strings, discordant rattles and clanks and thumps, and though it’s nothing surprising, it conveys a feeling of jittery anxiety well, and never really overwhelms the action. The acting is serviceable to good, but the dialogue - especially the sequences with Allison’s therapist - runs toward the clumsy and affected, and it’s definitely distracting at times. There are, on the other hand, some deft cinematic touches in the visual storytelling, so the overarching proposition is still one of a film that’s smarter than you’d expect from the premise.

The biggest problem to me is probably the third act, which starts strong, but then climaxes in a twist that absolutely beggars believability and leads to a series of events and narrative choices that push everything into much more disappointingly conventional territory. A lot happens very quickly and sort of glosses over how plausible any of it would be, some characters behave in really puzzling ways, and it takes the otherwise relatable, grounded story that we’ve been watching so far and pushes it into Grand Guignol in a way that to me didn’t really feel earned. There’s also one final flashback that feels like it’s supposed to be an important revelation, but it’s not really set up as well as it should be so it just feels a little confusing and out of nowhere, ending on a note as cliched as you might have expected before you started watching it. Which is too bad, because there was definitely something here that was working well for most of its running time, and it’s by the same director who made Last Shift, another film that seemed like it was going to be hackneyed mediocrity and ended up being much better than that. But that film, although not perfect, came nowhere close to sabotaging itself in the home stretch like this one did. You don’t get what you were expecting, and that’s good, until it isn’t.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi

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.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon