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★★★★☆
12 October 2018
A movie review of TUMBBAD. |
“That’s the only quality I have,” Vinayak (Sohum Shah)
TUMBBAD is an ambitious Indian horror film spanning three decades. "We'll torture her until she tells us, okay?" A kid says that. About an old lady. While the morality on display is grim, there is commentary on poverty and colonialism. Are impoverishment and being under the yoke of invaders the cause of a society's move away from compassion? The repercussions are cautionary and tragic, not preachy. So many horrors are lazy, generic time-wasters. This is not one of those. TUMBBAD feels fresh. Not many genre flicks open with a Gandhi quote, "Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's needs, but not every man's greed". Timely, as greed fuels the right wing. Greed for money, entitlement, and to be above the law.
TUMBBAD is an ambitious Indian horror film spanning three decades. "We'll torture her until she tells us, okay?" A kid says that. About an old lady. While the morality on display is grim, there is commentary on poverty and colonialism. Are impoverishment and being under the yoke of invaders the cause of a society's move away from compassion? The repercussions are cautionary and tragic, not preachy. So many horrors are lazy, generic time-wasters. This is not one of those. TUMBBAD feels fresh. Not many genre flicks open with a Gandhi quote, "Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's needs, but not every man's greed". Timely, as greed fuels the right wing. Greed for money, entitlement, and to be above the law.
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You know you're onto a winner when you think you've seen the scariest thing and it isn't. Making an ancient great-great-great grandmother formidable is some achievement. She looks desiccated. How is she still alive? She is the great-grandmother of the lead's grandfather. Why is she shackled to a wall? Why is her mouth almost entirely nailed shut? Why must you recite an incantation if she should wake? No audience member assumes she's there because of her love of giving sweets and making cups of tea.
A preamble quickly sets up the lore. And while it is rushed, the film will revisit to clarify. The eldest offspring of a goddess has an insatiable appetite for gold and food. What happened to him is revealed later. The great-great-great grandmother's hellish existence is linked. Buried beneath Vinayak's grandfather's mansion is supposedly a vast yet cursed treasure.
TUMBBAD consists of three chapters ranging from 1918 and reaching to 1947, and India's independence from the British Empire. More and more cinema from around the world is tackling the crimes and after effects of British imperialism. (See also this year, Irish revenge Western, BLACK 47.) Tumbbad is a place. An Indian village covered in perpetual rain. Vinayak is a child in 1918, and 15 years later comes back to seek out the treasure. Of course, it should have been left alone. Mercy killings, opium, and the worst kind of immortality are presented (think the climax of TV show ALIAS).
With a music score reminding of Vangelis, the filmmaking is slick, and the players are not the normal genre cannon fodder. And the ending is surprisingly sorrowful.
