MOVIE REVIEW: TUMBBAD (Screening as part of Revelation Film Festival)

Shane | 10 September 2019 | Reply

MOVIE REVIEW: TUMBBAD (Screening as part of Revelation Film Festival)
Directed by Rahi Anil Barve with Creative Director Anand Gandhi & co-director Adesh Prasad
Written by Mitesh Shah, Adesh Prasad, Rahi Anil Barve & Anand Gandhi
Starring Sohum Shah, Jyoti Malshe, Anita Date, Ronjini Chakraborty, Deepak Damle
Reviewed by Shane Pinnegar
84%

Imagine a God who is always hungry, always greedy for gold, always wanting more of everything. Then imagine that this God – one of the original Gods, the first child of the Goddess of Prosperity, the first of them all – was imprisoned under a decaying temple for aeons, and not allowed to be worshipped by anyone, lest his insatiable appetite infects them and fills them with greed.

In the 1920’s, this God, Hastar, has corrupted Grandma, and her daughter and grandchildren Vinayak and Sanashiv tend to her devotedly. She needs feeding every day lest she wake up and do Hastar’s horrible bidding.

Spanning three generations, Tumbbad – named after the village in which the temple is located – is a horror movie, make no mistake, but more than that, it’s a slow-burning treatise on the nature of greed: a morality play, if you like. We follow Vinayak as he becomes wealthy off the gold coins he daringly thieves from the imprisoned Hastar, and as he ages we see him sacrificing friends and happiness as the obsession slowly consumes him. Hastar’s curse eats at those who steal from him, just as his appetite eats at him.

Split into three parts – 1920, 1933 and 1947 – each iteration of the story proves denser, darker and deeper than the one before, and the co-director/writers ramp the tension up to edge-of-the-seat levels at times.

Tumbbad is a labour of love – you can see that every scene has been shot with a loving eye. Simply, this is a beautiful film, even in its dark and horrible moments (there are a few of them, brace yourself), and an uncommonly original and stylish one.