|| Tumbbad : Box Office & Reviews ||

Firstpost Oct 11, 2018 16:48 IST

By Anna MM Vetticad

When I was a child I used to imagine that there is a ghost in every commode, monsters under the bed, and that if you looked hard enough into the inky black night, especially up in the mountains, you would see the spectre of a white man from the colonial era about whom I had heard from an older relative (although she said the spirit descends from a ceiling calling out the words "Van Ross I'm coming").

There is no foreigner in Tumbbad. What we have instead is a wizened and diseased Indian grandmother, a frightened mother and two little children. When we meet them somewhere in rural Maharashtra about three decades before Independence, the mother is nursing the old woman while the kids puzzle over the mysterious goings-on in the shadowy innards of their decrepit habitation. They know that their parent is terrified of something, but they do not know for sure what it is. Looming in the background of their lives is a massive ancestral dwelling in the village of Tumbbad and a treasure they are not allowed to mention.

The air is ominous, and everything that follows serves to build up the sense of unease that settles in with the first shot. India wins her freedom from the British and the older son grows into a man (played by Ship of Theseus and Simran's Sohum Shah) still burning with curiosity about the fate that befell his family when he was a child and what that treasure could do for him.

As someone who derives immense masochistic pleasure from getting startled by the horror genre, I have to confess I draw the line at zombie coms and other works that do not rest on intelligent mind games but seek to creep us out with oozing pustules, crumbling monsters and festering wounds. I therefore settled into watching Tumbbad with considerable trepidation from the moment I saw an introductory shot of a decaying foot. Yet, curiously enough, although this film does have a fair share of bloodied and rotting bodies, there is nothing gory or visually repulsive about it. In fact, it soon becomes clear that director Rahi Anil Barve is not aiming at repelling the audience as much as leaving us spooked out and intrigued. DoP Pankaj Kumar (Ship of Theseus, Haider) evidently shares his vision since he shoots the film's creatures in a cleverly obtuse fashion without ever allowing his camera to stare at them, working far more on the power of suggestion than the spoonfed visual and greatly complemented by the sound - surprisingly understated for this genre - and production design.

Equally surprisingly understated are the performances of this excellent cast. Shah leads the charge, displaying his versatility by comfortably combining an alluring handsomeness with the slimy aspect of his character, in a role far removed from his niceness as the leading lady's beau in Simran.

Although Tumbbad is not a big film in conventional terms, in the sense that it features no superstars and is not flashy, it has certainly been mounted on a lavish scale. Kumar's cinematography contributes to the feeling of largeness, as does the art design. In terms of its images, it has been laid out like a triptych, with Segment 1 of the canvas dominated by the hero's living quarters which gradually metamorphose from a humble home into a semi-luxe Raja Ravi Varma painting; the second are the vast misty landscapes he traverses (which reminded me of the magnificence of Ship of Theseus); and third, a mysterious blood red arena.

Produced by Sohum Shah himself in association with Anand L "Tanu Weds Manu" Rai, Tumbbad is written by Mitesh Shah, Adesh Prasad, Barve himself and Ship of Theseus' director Anand Gandhi. The credits tell us that it has been inspired by the works of the late Marathi horror specialist Narayan Dharap. The end result of this collaboration is a somewhat indefinable film. Greed is the overriding theme. On the face of it, it is a horror flick with a folksy feel, a sort of fantastical desiretelling of The Goose That Laid The Golden Eggs. Yet when at one point the leading man goes hunting for hidden gems, he enters what appears to be the pulsating insides of an orifice in a human body, giving Tumbbad its allegorical resonance. Is he in a cave or within the mind of another being or...? It could be one or more of many options.

The joy of watching Tumbbad comes from the fact that Barve and his co-writers offer no answers, making this a delightfully intriguing film.

Rachit Gupta, TNN, Updated: Oct 11, 2018, 01.49 PM IST

Dark and deep

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: The best form of horror is one which plays with your mind. The fear of the uncertain and the unknown is what evokes the strongest emotions. Tumbbad is a perfect example of a film that creates a surreal illusion. This psychological horror has its traditional moments of blood and gore, but the most promising part of this terrifying fable is that it makes monsters out of ordinary men. 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 a great deal 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. Pankaj Kumar's cinematography captures the wide landscapes of Tumbbad to great effect. Nitin Zihani Choudhary and Rakesh Yadav's production design has achieved exceptional results in showing the macabre world of Tummbad. Their efforts add great detail to the blood-infused setting. Jesper Kyd's soundtrack also adds to the proverbial terror in debut director Rahi Anil Barve's movie.

Writers Mitesh Shah, Adesh Prasad, Anand Gandhi and Barve, have crafted an excellent tale. The movie serves up a good twist during the climactic portions too, one that fits perfectly with the theme. CGI, in the scenes with the monster aren't always top grade, but that's a minor grouse.

Tumbbad is a moody and atmospheric film. Some viewers may find the film a little too deep and disturbing, 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.

In-depth Analysis

Our overall critic's rating is not an average of the sub scores below.

Direction: 4.0/5

Dialogues: 4.0/5

Screenplay: 3.5/5

Music: 3.0/5

Visual appeal: 4.5/5

Tumbbad is a technically accomplished and edgy home-grown horror fantasy

Last Published: Thu, Oct 11 2018. 04 01 PM IST

Udita Jhunjhunwala

There are several moments during this 104-minute film that you feel your stomach tightening and clamp your eyes shut in anticipation of what is about to unfold in Tumbbad.

A blend of folklore and fantasy, director Rahi Anil Barve's imaginative horror (inspired by Marathi genre writer Narayan Dharap) builds on the mythology of Hastara god disgraced for this insatiable greed for wealth and food. However, in the perennially rain-soaked village of Tumbbad, Hastar is revered.

The film is divided into three chapters. Part one opens in 1918. Barve and co-director Adesh Prasad waste no time establishing the dark, wet and strange atmosphere. A widow and her two sons Vinayak and Sadashiv live in a secluded house. But there is a fourth resident and it is their task to tend to the rotting old woman chained in a dungeon, whose wrath can be managed by feeding her on time.

The immortal great-grandmother is the only one who knows where Hastar's treasure is buried, and Vinayak is obsessed with discovering its whereabouts.

The high point of part one is the scene of the grandmother dragging the impudent Vinayak through the cavernous house. It's everything this genre feature should bescary, grisly and full of evil dread.

Chapter 2 moves forward 15 years. Vinayak (Sohum Shah), a roguish grown man living in Pune, is seen heading back to Tumbbad. This could have been an electric mid-section had it simply been about Vinayak reuniting with his great grandmother and the treasure hunt. But Barve pads it out with glimpses into Vinayak's life as an affluent man with a wandering eye who is being exploited by Raghav (Deepak Damle), a local merchant.

Through the three chapters we see Vinayak's growing greed, his focus on finding the treasure and obsession with possessions. Part 3 jumps ahead to 1947. Even as the British colonisers are preparing to exit India, Vinayak's son (Mohammad Samad, with perhaps the best performance in the film), is showing hints of having inherited his father's avarice. As he is being trained to become the next treasure-hunter, can things end well for a family hungry for wealth?

Tumbbad is eerie, imaginatively designed, stunningly filmed and well directed. Cinematographer Pankaj Kumar uses close ups and tight frames to simulate claustrophobia. Production designers Nitin Zihani Choudhury and Rakesh Yadav paint pulsating wombs, create dimly lit passages and wild overgrown trees. The stunning visual effects and creepy creature designs complement the art direction. Jesper Kyd's music underscores the sense of foreboding that laces the entire saga written by Mitesh Shah, Anand Gandhi, Prasad and Barve and carefully edited by Sanyukta Kaza.

What the film forsakes in the acting department (with irregular performances), it more than compensates for with visual richness, artistry, imagination and genre-loyalty.

Tumbbad movie review: Writers of Rahi Anil Barve directorial deserve due credit

By Kunal Guha, Mumbai Mirror |Updated: Oct 11, 2018, 09:00 IST

Critic's Rating: 3.5/5

CAST:Sohum Shah,Jyoti Malshe,Anita Date,Deepak Damle,Ronjini Chakraborty,Mohammad Samad

DIRECTION:Rahi Anil Barve

GENRE:Drama,Horror,Thriller

A young boy is tasked with feeding a chained creature who is permanently locked up in a dilapidated ruin. This sub-human entity is an elderly woman who is only introduced through her moans and grunts and a flashing glimpse of her reptilian nails being clipped. The child is informed that this task is to be conducted only while she's asleep and that she mustn't be woken. As he takes measured steps through the dimly-lit passage to approach the room where she's captive, an ominous tune being hummed reaches him. A shot of her mutant face makes his skin crawl and he drops his lantern as the screen sinks into darkness. While he struggles to fire up a match, the presence creeps up behind him and begins dragging him by his feet. Tumbbad places its viewer sometimes subtly, sometimes explicitly so uncomfortably close to the events playing out on the screen, every whoosh and cackle can leave you paralysed. The technique of using sounds to allow viewers mentally fabricate the unknown draws on one's imagination and worst fears.

Set in the period between the early to mid-1900s, this one ushers us into the cursed village of Tumbbad where it rains through the year. The legend pins the extreme conditions to the condemned mythical deity Hastar's treasure which is supposedly buried here. A tragedy triggers Vinayak Rao and his mother (Jyoti Malshe) to leave the said village during his childhood. But he returns to Tumbbad as a young man (Sohum Shah) to pursue the hidden treasure. What he discovers may not be for the faint-hearted, but Rao's insatiable greed surpasses his fear of death and he takes on a life-threatening exercise which earns him a few gold mohurs each time around. While this elevates his lifestyle, Rao wants it all and devises a diabolical plan which could go either way. But since the film opens with the following quote by Gandhi "The world has enough for everyone's need but not for everyone's greed it's obvious how this one folds up.

While the film's premise is entirely original, a mutant granny who metamorphosises into a head with serpentine roots that cling from the ceiling to the floor is surely a visual inspired from David Lynch's acclaimed short film The Grandmother. But the fact that one would even compare this one to Lynch, says volumes of its execution. To begin with, the devil here is surely in the detail and Nitin Zihani Choudhary and Rakesh Yadav, credited for production design, give the surreal world of Tumbbad a distinguished edge. Cinematographer Pankaj Kumar renders even a car navigating a largely-barren landscape appear momentous. His camera follows the proceedings with a slight air of uncertainty as if mimicking the character's state of being. Editor Sanyukta Kaza lays out this story keeping the turns in check and the proceedings crisp, with a runtime under two hours.

Shah hangs on to his Vinayak like grim death and conveys the character's mind and manner in every frame. Child actor Mohammad Samad (previously seen in Gattu and Haraamkhor) is perhaps, the best casting call here. The young Samad, playing Vinayak's son, slips into his preteen's skin with complete immersion and surely has an illustrious future in celluloid. Malshe's brief part is so compelling, one momentarily feels that she has a key role here, while Anita Date offers a restrained performance as Rao's docile wife.

An issue with Indian horrors has been lack of imagination. A treasure chest that offers a gateway into a goddess' womb, a cursed undead whose heart beats even while the body has disintegrated and several such constructs cover this concern. Writers Mitesh Shah, Adesh Prasad, Anand Gandhi and Rahi Anil Barve (also the director), deserve due credit.

What doesn't kill you, makes you more resilient. And if you survive the version of Beelzebub in this film, you surely have the liver for heart-pounding horror.

Namrata Joshi

OCTOBER 11, 2018 17:46 IST

UPDATED: OCTOBER 11, 2018 17:46 IST

The atmosphere, landscape, and themes in Tumbbad' are accentuated by a sense of Gothic dread and an eerie expectancy of the diabolical

Tumbbad starts off with a sense of the unknown that is overwhelmingly suffocating. A young widow, her two sons, the grand matriarch handed over to their care and and the patriarch in the huge wada(family mansion), the custodian of its many hidden secrets and treasures. Add to that the rural, period Maharashtra ambience, the Konkani Brahmin culture and class, caste and gender exploitation underlined with a strange, Gothic dread and the unrelenting gloom of incessant rain. Fear has a location in the filma place called Tumbbad. Even as you want to run far away from it, a sense of curiosity and anticipation pull you back and make you linger on, in the consuming, smothering disquietude that defines it.

As a young boy Vinayak (Sohum Shah) is forced to leave Tumbbad and its darkness behind. As an adult, he voluntarily goes back and embraces it. His life and being is derived from Tumbbad and its wada. The film is remarkable in the way the moodiness, the atmosphere, and landscape are harnessed to create an eerie expectancy of the diabolical. Each shot feels like a painting, beautiful yet throbbing with an incipient fear. The film is many kinds of stories and storytelling rolled into one. There is the mythology of the Goddess and her womb; the legend of her firstborn beloved infernal son Hastar and the constant duel between two things most valued by humansgold and food. At another level, Tumbbad is the fantasy of a treasure hunt. All this set against the backdrop of pre-Independent India, on the cusp of getting freedom. And an oft-repeated supernatural reminder, "So jaa varna Hastar aa jaayega(go to sleep or else Hastar will come).

Tumbbad

Director(s): Rahi Anil Barve, Anand Gandhi, Adesh Prasad

Cast: Sohum Shah, Harish Khanna, Ronjini Chakraborty, Anita Date

Storyline: Though Vinayak is forced to leave Tumbbad as a kid, he returns to dive deep into the secrets of its wada (mansion)

Run time: 104 minutes

Hastar is the character on whom the moral fable gets centred. His curse may seem like a blessing in disguise to Vinayak, but it's the eventual nemesis. The raising of Hastar's head marks the descent into greed in man that will prove to be his ultimate undoing. The film is also about the perpetuation of the transgression greed is an inheritance passed on in generations, but from the father to the son. Women just stay on the margins and take care of the home. Add a Nathuram Godse reference and the Mahatma Gandhi quote at the start of the film "The world has enough for everyone's need, but not enough for everyone's greedand yet another layer is added to the parable.

These metaphorical meanings may seem to add to the film's richness but as the film progresses you also feel the makers are biting off more than they can chew. Things get needlessly complicated and confusing at points. The subplot in the middlewith Vinayak's mistressmay add to the patriarchal angle but gets treated by the makers like a needless divergence, one which hampers the progress of the narrative rather than propelling. The CGI monsters, the visual effects, the cavernous, red womb and blood and goreelements of the genre films get married to our indigenous folk tales. As the film progresses the explanatory begins to replace the enigmatic while you long for the shadowy, invisible demons of the mind lurking in the moody frames at the start of the film.

Mayank Shekhar

Mumbai

Oct 11, 2018, 07:30 IST

Tumbbad premiered at the prestigious critics' week at Venice film fest earlier this year. It opens locally this Friday to vastly expand your choices in Indian theatres. Yup, worth taking that call

Tumbbad

Tumbbad

A: Horror fantasy

Dir: Rahi Anil Barve

Cast: Sohum Shah

Rating: ***

Part morbid-fantasy, mostly magic-realism hardly a mainstream genre this is the sort of "festival" film that employs movie-horror as a way to draw you in, first. Since there are no creaking doors, and much less info on what's in store fewer dialogue, and hardly any reference points for the characters before us it takes a while to get used to this imaginary world.

How much time? Well, that depends on how patient you are as a lay (or lazy) audience. But, essentially, with some seriously effective, exquisite production design simultaneously traversing dark, empty well/cave; and vast, rain-soaked Maharashtrian rocky terrains (never so strikingly filmed since Avinash Arun's Marathi masterpiece, Killa) the film further juxtaposes legend/mythology, with a legit period drama.

The folklore relates to the Goddess of Plenty, who held the Earth in her womb. Her first-born, Hastar, turned out to be a greedy pig, cornering all the world's wealth; or gold, as it were. While his mother saved him from the resultant wrath even death as punishment he was cursed to never have a temple under his name. Tumbbad, a village of humans, defied that curse.

As a period piece, this film is chapterised into three time-lines, from early 1900s, down to mid-century basically capturing the transition from British imperialism, rural-urban feudalism, to Indian independence while the central character, a Brahmin boy, all the way to adulthood, remains attracted to Hastar's gold. Which is as good a McGuffin as Mackenna's Gold, to script an allegory around cardinal, Biblical sins greed, to start with, then lust, gluttony, sloth.

Actor Sohum Shah, best known for his brilliant debut in Anand Gandhi's Ship Of Theseus (2012), competently plays the lead Brahmin man, dealing with avarice, debauchery, decadence, dulling his mind, crushing his soul. Shah has also produced this film, earnestly directed by the debutant Rahi Anil Barve. Incidentally, this is also Gandhi's first submission on screen he's credited as writer, plus creative director ever since the path-breaking SoT.

For inspiration, the filmmakers point to Narayan Dharap (1925-2008) a tremendously prolific author (with over 100 titles), who I'm told, is also referred to as the Marathi 'Stephen King' (apparently some of his plots had seemed eerily similar to ones by the American superstar of supernatural fiction).

Either way, what we have here though is actually an artsy, gutsy mix of mythology, history, horror, and moral science. Do these elements seamlessly add up for you to naturally feel for the characters in the story? Honestly, no. Does the incredibly strong visual craftsmanship (rare for an Indian indie) satisfyingly guide you into a world hitherto unseen/unknown? Oh, absolutely.

Tumbbad premiered at the prestigious critics' week at Venice film fest earlier this year. It opens locally this Friday to vastly expand your choices in Indian theatres. Yup, worth taking that call.