The hamlet of Kalardiya has recently been introduced to the word ‘Oscars’. As they try to understand what it means to be watched by a world audience, the realisation slowly dawns on them that they have found a place on the world map thanks to the plaudits showered on Village Rockstars, shot in the very…
Indian Horror is coming of age and Tumbbad shows how
Netflix’s Ghoul introduced us to a kind of horror that was very uncharacteristic for what we have been used to in Bollywood. There were none of the distracting tropes that acted merely as fillers until the next jump-scare. Ghoul’s unremitting personality pulled us into its dystopian gloom through its atmosphere that was layered deliciously over…
Andhadhun has a lot more than meets the ‘eye’ | Every Theory Explained !
After a blistering opening weekend, Sriram Raghavan’s Andhadhun promises to be the breakout hit this year and deservedly so. Through some of the most ingenious scripts we have seen in a while, the film holds you at the edge of your seats, walking the fine line between a dark comedy and a thriller. True to…
Everything that went wrong with Venom
The journey of the Spiderman franchise has somewhat been like the Baudelaire twins from Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. The rights to the original Spiderman character were passed around from one owner to another during a severe cash-crunch in the 90s that had pushed Marvel to the brink of bankruptcy. In a time…
Andhadhun | Review
Olivier Treiner’s L’accordeur (French for The Piano Tuner) is a short film depicting a struggling pianist who elicits empathy from his audience by pretending to be a blind artist. That’s until he walks into a murder scene during one of his client visits. The short story is particularly impressive for it’s usage of the ‘Inciting…
Sui Dhaaga weaves together an instant classic
In the razzmatazz of a service economy, we have somehow forgotten the fact that India was a land of riches and opportunity. During the 1700s, under the reign of the Mughal Empire, India accounted for a quarter of the world’s GDP making it the most powerful and self-reliant economy in the world. It was only…
Manto is the most important film of our time
Just twelve years before the birth of Saadat Hasan Manto, a man breathed his last. He had been a writer of the highest calibre, writing unabashed about social decadence, the misplaced concept of beauty, and breaking the archetype of sexuality. As could have been expected for the times then, as they can be now, his…
Manmarziyaan | Review
“If it is right, it happens—the main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.”– John Steinbeck The beauty of Love is that despite all the glaring imperfections visible on the surface, the emotion is tenacious enough to vanquish all and arouse something ethereal within us. Anurag Kashyap’s Manmarziyaan is an exploration of the…
The Predator | Review
If you are a millennial in India, you have probably grown up watching Star Movies, which was our quintessential gateway to Hollywood back in the 90s. When you want to create an audience where none exists, you introduce them to the blitz and bang of action films. The Star Group understood that very well and…
Gali Guleiyan is why I write about Film
In the dingy back-alleys of a forgotten Delhi, decrepit buildings find themselves entangled with overhanging electrical wires covered with the soot and grime of everyday life. Somewhere inside one of those tenements, lives a man who sits in front of a TV set peering intently into the goings-on. His face is contorted with a deep-seated…
The Nun | Review
When it comes to milking a franchise till posterity, The Conjuring universe has become a cow that keeps on giving. After the phenomenal reception that the first two films received from the audience, James Wan set a template for horror film-makers proving time and again that horror can be a money-making genre right up there…
Searching and the Genre of Technopomorphism
Social Media has pervaded so deep into our world that even after we die, our consciousness would still live through the technological footprint that we would leave behind. Maybe someday, Bioscientists would become capable enough to recreate us from the string of binary shadow of us that would be floating around in the ocean of…
