Single Salma Is A Surprisingly Effective Film That Finds Charm In Familiarity
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Nachiket Samant's film subscribes to stereotypes without peddling them and perpetuates predictability without ruining them. This might sound easy, but maintaining such a balance is a feat, writes Ishita Sengupta.
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| | | Cast: Huma Qureshi, Shreyas Talpade, Sunny Singh, Kanwaljit Singh | | | | FILMS CENTRING ON WOMEN are often tethered to an issue and conclude with a resolution. This is as much a roadmap as an outline; an overused detour and a rewarding shorthand. Nachiket Samant’s Single Salma ascribes to this with commitment. The protagonist, as the name suggests, is a single woman and her singlehood, as the first ten minutes hint, is the issue. She is 33, the eldest among the four siblings, and is drowning in responsibilities. As most stories like this go, by the end, Salma ought to have her life in control, deliver a spiel about being overlooked for being a girl, find love and find herself in the process. She does, and yet all of this feels novel. Written by Mudassar Aziz, Amina Khan and Ravi Kumar, Single Salma is one of those atypical Hindi films that earns ingenuity through reiteration and accrues appeal by familiarity. It subscribes to stereotypes without peddling them and perpetuates predictability without ruining them. This might sound easy, but maintaining such a balance is a feat, especially when Hindi films either typecast or go home. Your pop culture fix awaits on OTTplay, for only Rs 149 per month. Grab this limited-time offer now! Take, for instance, the setting and the people. Based in Lucknow, the film revolves wholly around a Muslim household. A single hand moves up for a greeting, Urdu words float in the air. None of this is extraordinary, of course, but identity in cinema today is thorny. Single Salma also comes at a time when the community's depiction is getting increasingly erased from the forefront or being wrapped in excess. Samant’s portrayal, however, carries a fuss-free dexterity that dissuades empty speculations. The names are spelt out, the language is on the tongue of the characters, and that’s all the film chooses to say on the matter. |
| | Diés Iraé Proves Horror Can Be Minimalist — & Still Terrifying
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Rahul Sadasivan stacks Diés Iraé with pulpy twists of Jenga blocks, where each reveal shakes up the larger plot. The film’s whole deal is to make us trust our assumptions and then pull the rug away from us. Aditya Shrikrishna reviews.
| | | | Cast: Pranav Mohanlal, Gibin Gopinath, Arun Ajikumar Jaya Kurup | | | | RAHUL SADASIVAN has a thing for singular settings. His genre can often be defined as chamber horror. In Bhoothakaalam, the film that announced him, it is the dysfunctional domestic abode that is both the place and the protagonist. In Bramayugam, a 17th-century mana belonging to a Namboothiri, shot in glorious monochrome, makes us wonder if it is haunted or is the object that haunts.
Sadasivan’s horror impulses are always churning, and now in this generational run, his latest film Diés Iraé begins from inside a cement churner as we gradually pan out to another conspicuous space, the desolate site under construction with unpainted walls, windowless free falls and an assorted collection of safety hazards. A tea glass breaks, and the contractor, Madhu (Gibin Gopinath), offers an ominous look before receiving a phone call that announces a death by suicide. We move away, still searching for this film’s setting.
The body fished out of the well in the courtyard of a home is that of a young woman, a dancer named Kani (Sushmitha Bhat). She didn’t leave a note, but Madhu remains disturbed. Her younger brother Kiran (Arun Ajikumar) exudes nervous energy about him, and he notices that her hand refuses to rest. The hand springs right back up with the fingers shaped into a claw. A quick cut takes us from shocked mourning to intense persuasion. |
| | IT: Welcome To Derry — Prequel To Hit Films Is A Knockout Halloween Gift |
Deeper, complex with added layers of racial inquiry and politics, this new adaptation of a beloved Stephen King creation is endlessly rewarding, Manik Sharma writes.
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| | | Cast: Bill Skarsgård, Taylour Paige, Jovan Adepo, Chris Chalk, James Remar | | | | IN A SEQUENCE from the first episode of IT: Welcome to Derry, Theodore, an innocent but curious kid, asks his Rabbi father a speculative question — can someone kidnap a kid and keep them underground? It’s a general rebuke of the laws of physics by a child who clearly hasn’t arrived at the understanding of any. It’s precisely the world of disbelief that Stephen King’s world of warm horror is set in. That right mix of toe-curling scares, Christmas-y nightmares and the benevolence of a summer music album that choruses love, heartbreak and growing up on the fringes of a sleepy town. The texture of a box of chocolates, percolated by the sense of something more sinister, gruelling and come to think of it, nasty. The fact that a new adaptation wants to also tackle racial history and geopolitics only adds to the richness of the festive box. The new series, slated to serve as a prequel to the wildly successful IT films, as a result, feels richer, gorier and true to streaming, worthy of its stretched lifespan. The show opens on a snowy January day in 1962, in Derry, Maine. A 12-year-old boy, Matty Clements (Miles Ekhardt), has just been ushered out of the local theatre for stealing his way into a film screening he did not have the tickets to. This little boy, you can tell, has to go back to an abusive family. Rather than do so, he plucks his mood pacifier and hitches a ride out of town with what seems like a jolly family of four. The journey of escape, however, devolves into one of the most terrifying reveals that a horror series has managed to put together in the recent past. Featuring a flesh-eating demon baby, an umbilical cord cut from hell and the tardy, yet impressive ergonomics of violence that refuses to hold back for the sake of the victim’s age. This again is King’s world, where the sacred and the sacriligeous often confront each other for validity. IT: Welcome to Derry | From Pennywise's growing terror to Derry's ancient lore — what to expect from the season |
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