Tumbbad: A gorgeous looking, intriguing morality tale

MOVIE  CAST:- Sohum Shah, Mohammad Samad, Anita Date, Deepak Damle, Jyoti Malshe 
MOVIE DIRECTOR:- Rahi Anil Barve
CRITICS RATINGS:- 4/5

TUMBBAD STORY:- A young boy Vinayak Rao is affected by a personal tragedy. His encounter with a wretched old lady who knows of a buried treasure sets him on the path to greed. He grows up to explore the local legend of a monster named Hastar and his gold medallions. 

TUMBBAD REVIEW:- An ancient myth. A hideous demon. Hidden treasure. Human greed. This potent mix is stirred and ground in Tumbbad, and the result is a highly unusual, visually stunning, richly atmospheric concoction of genres and themes: horror, fantasy, social, period. I also found echoes of folk-tales, not your cosy happy-ever after kinds, but the ones that leave you distinctly uneasy. Remember the one with the gingerbread man with his button eyes? He’s always given me the shivers. Tumbbad, which features a variation made out of flour, an ‘aate ki gudiya’ which fulfils a singular purpose, does too.

At one level, you can see Tumbbad as a film about insatiable greed and the consequences thereof. At another, it digs, literally and metaphorically, deeper: are humans ever satisfied; is enough ever enough? Greed, it shows us, turns men into monsters. That is true horror. A greedy human can be a lot more malicious than a cursed supernatural entity. Ideas like that make Tumbbad a real mind-bender and the film's top-notch production design makes it a movie that truly reinvents the horror genre for Indian cinema.

The film kicks off with a CGI sequence of gods and goddesses and a strong allegory of the destructive nature of greed. Tumbbad, an actual village in Maharashtra, becomes the fabric of this tale. Incessant rain becomes the wrath of gods, and you can’t really tell what’s more grey, the characters or the locales. The film is set during the latter part of the British Raj and the period setting adds an air of authenticity to the story. Vinayak Rao, a young Maharashtrian Brahmin boy, loses his innocence when he faces adversity and tragedy. He’s introduced to the legend of Hastar, a mythical creature born out of a goddess, but one who’s selfish urge for gold and food got the better of him. But Hastar’s treasure full of gold medallions is buried somewhere underneath the estate of the local zamindar in Tumbbad. Vinayak’s mother is the caretaker for the zamindar’s wretched wife, referred to as Dadi (grandmom), who is also believed to be cursed by Hastar. Her appearance is so vile that you’ll feel Freddy Krueger from A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984) is beautiful.

Sohum Shah plays the adult Vinayak, who becomes obsessed with unearthing Hastar’s treasure. Slowly and steadily, Vinayak’s obsession turns him into a cold-blooded opportunist and Shah fills in plenty of grey shades into the performance. His snigger, his eyes and even his limp become emotional cursors for the audience to despise him. It’s a performance par excellence. In perfect sync are the film’s technical departments. I’m routinely petrified in horror films, and to begin with when Tumbbad shows us a dark corridor, and a creature who may have been there for centuries (‘budhiya’, she is called, but how many centuries she’s been buried under dirt, and dust, and putrid soars is left to our imagination), I confess I did close my eyes.

Its a highly recommended movie but fans of Hollywood horror films will be reminded of memorable movies in the genre like Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) and Eraserhead (1977). This one is genuinely scary.

My rating ------ 8.5/10