Posted:
A mythological story about a goddess who created the entire universe. The plot revolves around the consequences when humans build a temple for her first-born.
Trailer:
[YOUTUBE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sN75MPxgvX8[/YOUTUBE]
Big Boss 19: Daily Discussion Thread - Aug 28, 2025
Yeh Rishta Kya Kehlata Hai - 28 Aug 2025 EDT
BHAROSA THODNA 28.8
Trump imposes 50% tariff on India for buying Russian oil??!
Who impressed you more in the movie Saiyaara?
Anupamaa 28 Aug 2025 Written Update & Daily Discussions Thread
Vash Level 2 - Reviews And Box Office
10 years of Phantom
Abhira : The self-respect queen
Tumbbad
Director - Rahi Anil Barve
Cast - Sohum Shah, Harish Khanna
Rating - 3/5
The rain never stops in the town of Tumbbad. It is an accursed land because it holds a temple to an accursed god a god so wretched that his name must not be spoken and yet this god holds gold, which is why the temple exists, and why this curse is wilfully borne by the greedy as they brave the un-drought and seek damned riches.
Directed by Rahi Anil Barve and shot by the incredible Pankaj Kumar, Tumbbad is a visually startling film that seeks to surprise instead of scare. It plays out like a Panchatantra tale narrated by a drunk and inappropriate uncle, a story that has a very simple moral core this one is about golden eggs and golden geese but has bits that get under the skin. This is not a horror movie, nor does it create a particularly substantial myth, but the little gothic details are delicious.
The film often feels like overkill, trying too hard to captivate us when we're already intrigued. Tragically, the characters are less imaginative than the images. Based on the stories of Marathi horror writer Narayan Dharap the title coming from Shripad Narayan Pendse's novel Tumbadche Khot Tumbbad is the story of a boy who grows up obsessed with the temple's treasure. As he grows up, he finds a way to get it, coin by coin, lowering himself deeper into the forbidden abyss as he, like a storyteller, mines the myth.
Set from 1913 to 1947, the period detailing is authentic as well as fanciful. There are boys with tikis, a grotesque old woman who looks like an outtake from Mad Max: Fury Road, and a ponytailed moneylender who has a sign on his door that requests the visitor to ring the bell only once because the inhabitants are not deaf. The protagonist Vinayak, played by an impressive Sohum Shah, smiles at this and promptly rings it twice.
The story becomes exasperatingly concentric, as Vinayak gets addicted to narrow escapes and keeps going back to the temple for more. The film thus finds itself in a loop as we see it play out for over thirty years, a short story told by a longform narrator. I marvelled at things, but also yawned.
Remember the scene in the classic comedy Pyaar Kiye Jaa where Mahmood narrates a horror film to Om Prakash? The story wasn't much but the sound effects were spectacular. Tumbbad is a bit like that which really isn't a bad thing. Barve is a director with vision and a voice, and his film will undoubtedly spawn a cult of admirers. And, ideally, imitators. If there's one thing Tumbbad has to say, it is that all gods need believers.
Rohit Vats | News18.com
nawabjha
'What seemed missing in Tumbbad was that screwiness, that kinkiness, which shades so many of our best parables,' observes Sreehari Nair.
Rahi Anil Barve's Tumbbad isn't as much a horror film as it is a fairy tale for grown ups.
An old woman is lulled into sleep by a threat classically reserved for children: 'Sleep oh old lady, or the devil will be here!'
There are underlayers of starving monsters and webby secret chambers, but no Alices or compassionate barn spiders. The labyrinths in the film open exclusively for brutes and testosterone-drenched men.
Chief among these brutes is Vinayak Rao (Sohum Shah), a monomaniacal gold-seeker in the Maharashtra of early 1900s.
Rao is like Aguirre from Herzog's The Wrath of God; only, it's a one-man army that he commands.
Like Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood,(Sohum Shah's face, moustache, and untrusting eyes are styled to resemble that of Plainview's), Vinayak Rao believes that the secrets of the earth and for the 'men of the earth' to uncover.
As a boy, Rao cracks the code to his ancestral gold at the precise instant that he loses his younger brother: He is too charged by the vision of treasure and far-off adventure to mourn his brother's death. Rao is a brother who acts unbrotherly, and later, as a father, someone who does unfatherly things.
The story, one part of a mythology, talks about how greed is an inescapable cycle, a matter of inheritance passed down from fathers to sons -- seen this way, the film is a critique of capitalism.
There's a powerful parable at work here, but what Tumbbad fails to do is use the medium of cinema to convey the power of that parable.
While the arc of Vinayak Rao's life resembles an epic, what we don't feel is the emotional rush of epic storytelling.
The sense of dread is steady, but it's not a lyric sense of dread.
The images of nature, what with the Rashomon-like rain, attempt to overpower you, but they don't have that sensuous pull.
Movies affect our senses so directly because they can retain their honesty even when they turn corrupt. (Cinema must be our only hope for great tawdry art).
In Tumbbad, our apprehensions are raised lazily and we wait like masochists for the manipulations to arrive, but what we get instead is a single-line moral.
Barve and his co-writer (Anand Gandhi of The Ship of Theseus fame) have evidently proceeded from a big chunk of material -- a lot of which is safe-kept in their heads. But because the manifestations of that safe-kept material are not present clearly in the narrative, we are never quite invited in.
The parable looms over everything; so much so that even the layered gags feel untapped.
Vinayak Rao's quest for gold begins with him as a boy covered in wheat flour and it culminates in his using the flour as a bait to tame the otherworldly creature that guards his ancestral treasure.
This goes on and we see the wheat flour becoming an inextricable part of Rao's domestic life but the gag doesn't stand out in a way that it should have for us to feel like a part of what is going on.
The dialogues play for economy but sound stunted (Why, oh, why wasn't this film made in Marathi?).
The undercurrent of incessant moralising (there are no speeches thankfully, but the moralising tone flows relentlessly as it did in The Ship of Theseus) does not allow for the scenes to be shaped. And so, even when the story hops about 1918, 1933 and 1947, the effect is static.
As I looked back at the film, what seemed missing in Tumbbad was that screwiness, that kinkiness, which shades so many of our best parables.
Why we love the tale of Scheherazade in 1001 Nights is because at its core is a bloodthirsty monarch whose first reaction to boredom is killing.
There's just that tinge of insanity given its due, which raises the storytelling risks.
Why we prefer the Panchatantra to Aesop's Fables is because the former is more amoral and screwy and gleefully so (The War of Crows and Owls is deliciously savage, but how well we get its message).
In untying its parable about greed, Tumbbad keeps its shadings at a safe distance -- and so the parable at its centre does not extend its bounds; it feels not bracing enough. (We are never swimming in it, only playing distant observers).
Vinayak Rao has a mistress (Ronjini Chakraborty), who is his reward for his wealth and his power, and when Rao's little son after his first treasure-digging expedition stakes his claim over this mistress, the underlying drama there has all the makings of a great sick joke.
But Barve and his writers treat it merely as a sign of decadence.
This means that the scene does not become tragicomic -- which was its true potential.
For the fantasy in Tumbbad to work, the reality had to seem equally frightening and crazy; but because the realities surrounding the parable are trimmed away before their emotional peaks are hit, the scares never quite reach us.
And when the fantasy finally kicks in, secret chambers are opened to variations of the same secret. There is no density of imagination; the aura is that of a one-trick children's fable.
A combination of beauty and horror is the device that best communicates to us terrible truths -- this, we don't get in Tumbbad.
The look of the film is Goya meets Graphic Novel; with scenes shot either in the claustrophobic darkness of Puneri Wadas or colour-drained outdoors. (In this sense, the self-serious tone feels well spread out).
I was yearning for some fireworks of moviemaking to compensate for the cold allegory. But what you get at the most is the camera used as a constant companion to the actors: Following them tightly or held smack-up against their anxious faces.
The reliefs in Tumbbad are delivered through whatever little touches seep out of its outsized source material.
When Vinayak Rao's wife opens her own flour mill, the message on the board outside reads: 'Get your cereals ground by a Brahmin Lady!'
The board outside Vinayak Rao's friend's house reads, 'You only have to knock thrice; we are not deaf.'
A trip to Pune will tell you that such messages hold a mirror to the city's distant attitude (Shops in Pune still have boards with requests of order of: 'Please do not ask us for directions!!!')
Vinayak Rao's relationship with his son is the most interesting dynamic in the film.
In an awfully moving stretch of the story, the kid is shown to be getting physically ready to accompany his father on his treasure-digging trip. But Rao knows that it's not about physical readiness: He senses that the boy isn't greedy enough; that he takes after his mother and not him.
By the time we get to this last act of his life, Vinayak Rao is a lonely, distrustful man whose success is shown to spawn even more paranoia.
I occasionally got the feeling that perhaps the movie needed a grander lead (someone who could tower over the landscape and then slowly shrink down) but Sohum Shah does very well.
He brings in the Marathi inflections smartly, and it is majorly owing to his intuitions as an actor that his character isn't turned into an outright animal.
The parable of Tumbbad is out to de-humanise Vinayak Rao, but Sohum Shah preserves his humanity.
The film is straight Church Work. But Shah keeps even his curses close to prayers.
10:29 AM PDT 8/30/2018 by Deborah Young
Totally fearless and rapaciously greedy, the larger-than-life hero of Tumbbad (played by actor and producer Sohum Shah) literally lowers himself into the womb of Mother Earth to fish for gold coins in the loincloth of the goddess' bad-boy offspring. Not a film for the squeamish or claustrophobic, this unusual blend of horror, fantasy and Indian folktales set in the 19th century British Raj recalls a revisited Brothers Grimm, along the lines of Matteo Garrone's gorily memorable Tale of Tales. Viewers willing to make the imaginative leap into Indian folklore will be rewarded with the foggy atmosphere and turgid emotions of a story full of goose bumps and serious frights.
It is a sign of the times that a genre film, accomplished as it is, is opening the Venice Critics' Week, once a stronghold of social themes and odes to youthful, arty rebellion. Tumbbad is a straightforward stomach-tightener that should perform well in India, with some break-outs for distributer Eros International. True, there's a bit of talk about Indian independence and one character proposes assassinating Mahatma Gandhi, but the historic elements in the film are basically time markers, nothing more.
Though the film is directed by newcomers Rahi Anil Barve and Adesh Prasad (the latter is credited as co-director), who like Shah and several other members of the cast and crew were involved in Anand Gandhi's 2013 cult film Ship of Theseus, there is nothing amateurish or uncertain about the production. The meticulous art direction and costume design combine with Pankaj Kumar's smoky lighting to evoke a breathless mood that carries the film from its first creepy scenes in a rain-soaked hut to the final inevitable debacle.
Curses and blessings mingle rather sickeningly in the Rao family, which lives somewhere in rural India in the late 19th century. Sadashiv and his older brother Vinayak are small boys wearing long pigtails and traditional garb. While their widowed mother (Jyoti Malshe) tarries over her unnatural duties in their grandfather's crumbling mansion, they live in misery in a hut with a chained monster their great-grandmother who they must feed while she sleeps.
The long, complicated story slowly comes out. A long time ago, the mother goddess had a greedy baby named Hastar. On account of his misappropriation of gold and food, the gods cursed him never to be worshipped. But the Rao family ignored this edict and built a shrine to Hastar and his mother. Although the baby is a real demon, he has been the fount of the family riches, and generation after generation they have risked their lives to steal gold from his divine diapers. But accidents happen, and in granny's case, she was nipped by Hastar and reduced to immortal agony.
Inheriting the family rapacity is little Vinayak (Dhundiraj Prabhakar Jogalekar, voiced by Malhar Pravin Damle), who, finding himself alone in the hut one night, dares to unchain the witchy monster in a scene fraught with terror. But the terror is the audience's more than the bold little boy's. He is almost eaten but learns the secret of Hastar's treasure and vows to return for it.
We next find Vinayak a bright-eyed, strong-bodied man with a moustache (Shah) eagerly making his way alone back to the family estate. The hut is a mass of cobwebs and he finds great-granny reduced to a skeleton. A tree has grown out of her empty stomach. And she is still alive.
Shah does a spectacular job of creating a fascinating, lustful rogue who, by his own admission, has only one quality: greed. But of course he also has immense, reckless courage and the ability to keep his eyes fixed on a single goal: money. In town, he moves into a large house with his simple-hearted wife (Anita Date), cashing in a handful of gold coins at a time with the colorful broker and opium dealer Raghav (a twinkling, genielike Deepak Damle). But as he watches the gold pour in, Raghav starts getting greedy, too. Too bad he doesn't know the family secret of handling little Hastar.
His gruesome punishment is highlighted by realistic VFX from Sean Wheelan and Filmgate Films in Sweden, which created the CG work and animated 3D characters, including the magnificent, hair-raising flayed devil. In the final scenes, Sohum and his disabled young son climb down ropes into the mother's pulsating red womb one last time, determined to risk all. The fairytale elements fall into place in a climax of real horror.
Rahi Anil Barve and Adesh Prasad's film, that inaugurated the Venice Critics' Week, is a truly original "horror movie that's actually more of a ghoulish Panchatantra fable
Directors: Rahi Anil Barve, Adesh Prasad
Cast: Sohum Shah, Mohammad Samad, Jyoti Malshe
The Venice Critics' Week was inaugurated with Rahi Anil Barve and Adesh Prasad's non-Competition entry, Tumbbad that's the name of the very rainy village in which the story unfolds. Technically, though, the section was inaugurated with Toni D'Angelo's 20-minute Italian short, Nobody's Innocent, which played before Tumbbad, like the first part of a double bill. In some ways, this was a very "Indian film, too, given its theme of how hate speech poisons even educated minds, by stereotyping certain sections of society as "evil. Towards the end, it became clear why Nobody's Innocent was a fit with Tumbbad, which has been promoted as a horror movie. The latter is fantastical horror, while the former's horrors are all too real in some ways, it's scarier.
But again, technically speaking, Tumbbad which begins in 1918 and ends a little after Independence isn't exactly a "horror movie. It's more like a ghoulish Panchatantra fable, a morality tale based on the works of Marathi horror writer, Narayan Dharap, and harking back to Mahatma Gandhi's warning: "The world has enough for everyone's need, but not enough for everyone's greed. The protagonist is Vinayak (a superb Sohum Shah). When he was a boy, his widowed mother (Jyoti Malshe) aspired for one mudra, or gold coin. But even then, the young Vinayak wants more. He's heard of a great treasure buried in a local palace. And when he grows up and marries and has a son (Pandurang, beautifully played by Mohammad Samad), the boy wants even more than his father did. (It's hilarious. Vinayak "trains his son in the family business the way a lawyer or accountant would.) The greed grows with generations.
Tumbbad opens with some mumbo-jumbo about the goddess of plenty. "The earth is her womb. Make a note of that. Tumbbad is filled with womb-like corridors and pits and wells. The fantastical elements are, to be sure, disorienting as is the spectacular production design (Nitin Zihani Choudhary, Rakesh Yadav); watch out for those creepily ornate locks and spiked doors but there are shades, here, that are startling, given the genre. Deep inside one of these womb-like spaces, the floors are fleshy and red. It's like crawling back to the ooze where you came from. It's also a make-your-own-metaphor invitation. Like a miner, Vinayak goes deep down and emerges with riches. This may be a metaphor within a metaphor, with Vinayak being a Brahmin, a stand-in for the usurping upper classes who hoard wealth instead of sharing it.
The trailer introduced us to a demon named Hastar, son of the mother goddess but unlike a typical horror movie (which is where we usually encounter demons), this is not the spirit that terrorises the protagonist and his family. In a way, you could say it's the other way around, with Vinayak terrorising and exploiting Hastar, the forgotten child of earth. This is when you realise how truly original Tumbbad is. The inner demons that drive our basest desires are far more malevolent than something with supernatural powers. If the typical horror movie with demons is about screams and sensation, Tumbbad plays like a surreal drama the principal sensation is dread, a coiled unease that you feel in the innards. The comparison you reach for isn't The Conjuring, but something like Don't Look Now or Lost Highway.
The film does not explain, say, why it's been raining non-stop since Hastar was "awakened. And some of the plot points aren't clear. (Why, for instance, was Vinayak's mother entrusted with the task of caring for, in her home, a witch-like woman whose gnarled skin suggests she was born even before the mother goddess?) But after a while, you realise Tumbbad isn't something you follow through its narrative. The story is driven by the stunning images contrasts of light and dark, or water and fire, which are shot like cave paintings by cinematographer Pankaj Kumar. Many of these images a drenched woman in a red sari, a boy with flour on his face are repeated, as are themes like patriarchy and toxic masculinity. The men use women for sex, hate them being independent, and think they exist only to perform household chores. The mother goddess is a distant memory.
I apologise if I've made Tumbbad sound like something only Rubik's-cubers will get. It's just that a film with demons rarely lends itself to subtext we keep getting information that seems to build to something bigger. Like the reason Hastar, son of the earth, hungers for food (like how the farmers who produce what we eat often go hungry). Like how the sign "flour pounded by Brahmins contrasts with the post-Independence image of flour being machine-ground in a mill, as the lower-caste labour class sits by. Like how Vinayak's money goes towards the cause that Nathuram Godse espouses, which loops back to the Gandhi quote that opens the movie. It may not be too much of a stretch to say that, instead of a haunted house, Tumbbad is about a haunted nation, possessed not by the devil but by the past. It's been a while since something (apparently) genre-based turned out so rich and mysterious, so defiantly its own thing.
Star Cast: Sohum Shah, Anita Date, Ronjini Chakraborty, Mohd Samad, Jyoti Malshe
Director/s: Rahi Anil Barve, Anand Gandhi, Adesh Prasad
Tumbbad Movie Review: Never Knew Fear Could Look So Beautiful!What's Good: Pankaj Kumar's cinematography creates an atmosphere that will spook you out but still make you stick to your seat to narrate an intriguing tale, Jesper Kyd's background score which adds to cinematic brilliance
What's Bad: A strange thing about mystery is, it's only intriguing until it's not known! In the first half, makers put out way too much about the beast & hence the interest starts to slip
Loo Break: If you're scared of horror, you'll have to take one naturally but as far as the film is concerned you shouldn't break the link
Watch or Not?: This isn't your usual Bollywood horror flick, this has a story! Watch it for its thrilling moments & a very dark yet satisfying tone
User Rating:
Tumbbad Movie Review: Never Knew Fear Could Look So Beautiful!Sohum Shah delivers a haunting performance as Vinayak. The greed is visible through his expressions & that's a great feat to achieve when you've such a role to play. He's wicked but at the same time displays the emotions that one can totally relate with. The actress playing Vinayak's mother is amazing in her little role.
Anita Date (Vinayak's wife) delivers a fine performance too. Ronjini Chakraborty (Vinayak's mistress) is a natural, Mohd Samad (Vinayak's son) is a star of the second half, Jyoti Malshe (Vinayak's grandmother) as the creepy old woman will haunt your dreams for a long time.
Rahi Anil Barve is the mastermind behind the story of Tumbbad which is inspired by Shripad Narayan Pendse's Marathi novel Tumbadche Khot. But Anand Gandhi and Adesh Prasad stepped in later to rework on the already shot film. As said before, it's the story and screenplay that required some brushing; there are no major complaints with the direction.
As far as songs are concerned, it's just a single title song composed by Ajay-Atul and sung by Atul Gogavale. It's played at the various junctures in the film and is effective every single time. Jesper Kyd's background score is one of the best to come out of a Bollywood film.
Movie Review: The Last Word
All said and done, Tumbbad is one magnificent looking film. A dark fusion of horror, fantasy, drama and thriller the story of Tumbbad is surely to haunt your thoughts even after you leave the cinema hall. A treat for the lovers of this genre.
Three and a half stars!
So long valley review Tridha Choudhury and Akanksha Puri...
Detective Sherdil review thread (Diljit Dosanjh) https://x.com/zee5india/status/1935767034262176252?s=46 t=gmo_g396jwmtO4eUOAuljw
Panchayat season 4 review thread discuss...
The royals review thread...
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DKjKXYYTycH/?igsh=MWdicmhxZTg1cDZrYQ== https://www.instagram.com/reel/DKmk4-2p_-E/?igsh=MXJ3MHdmMG5ocWJwcg==
Kumkum Bhagya
Tu Dhadkan Main Dil
Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi 2
0