A ravaged earth and mythos of female awakening-these forces propel Bhargav Saikia’s capacious, vividly drawn debut, Bokshi. These themes shadow the narrative as we follow high-schooler Anahita (Prasanna Bisht, fiercely committed and unflinching) through trauma🎃 and reclamation of agency. In the wake of a scarred childhood, a mother who vanished, she is an outlier, a quiet, receding presence. At home, neither her father nor grandmother finds her intimate trust. They don’t ever talk about her mother, who belonged to the Marai tribe. Anahita yearns to discover more about her mother, latching onto traces lodged in the arcane. Struck by Anahita’s sudden streaks of violence, they send her off to boarding school.
The film has a sprawl, a canvas unhesitant to spread out over a vast temporal expanse. It is as rooted in the present as primeval. History, cyclicality, the ecological-all are threaded together into a stew of expectant violence, base instincts about to rear itself. Desires and rage run low, waiting for the right moment to strike. A piece of the puzzl💧e is missing. The wanted individual is slowly drawn, inducted into the folds of duty and obligation that predate her birth. The cult can gather its full, terrifying power with the inclusion.
Saikia takes time to build the narrative with swirling, suggestive connotations. Tales of the past are tucked into folds of the hidden, noxiously escalating drama. It’s a fable writ expansively, Saikia constructing an episteme replete with symbols and motifs shining through rock inscriptions. Secrets from Anahita’s childhood hover before her always, a reminder that yokes her to a bundle of trauma. She hasn’t been able to move beyond, heal from the horror of her mother. The familiar, the maternal had long disappeared into a shell of the ritualistic, hewn to an entrenched tribal past. The enigmatic history teacher Shalini, holding close a teeming bunch of provocative secrets, is the link to the past. She forages and taps clues that can unlock a hushed history, deeds dangerous. Shalini manipulates, spins any and all who follow her towards the “pre-destined”. Multani wields a charged, allusive and inviting presenℱce, melding allure and destruction. Her Shalini is a beckoning to the forbidden. It’s the girls who are especially captivated by her. Anahita is no different. Her self-confidence is so plunging, having been overlooked in her previous school, she’s reluctant to believe Shalini will actually trust her.
Anahita is repressed, pulling back. Bullying and ridicule push her to retreat further and further into herself. With whom can she share her deep-sunk trauma and be truly, empathetically understood? Shalini seems like a person willing to respect her intelligence and capability, not dismiss, judge or laugh her off. She lets Anahita join a class trip deep into the forests o🐻f North Sikkim. This trek dominates the bulk of the narrative,🌄 which is divided into numerical chapters. Shalini guides them into the centre of a labyrinth. It’s different from a maze, she insists. There’s a pre-destination: “all must reach”.
Bokshi is a story of shamans, sacrifices and trapped spirits, arcing back to the ancient, the beginning of creation itself. Headed to a pre-historic site, the excursion devolves into rising terror at the mystery as it unfurls. At the helm of things, Shalini is unshakable, firm in connecting the dots. She rallies everyone to forge ahead despite abundant warnings by the locals. There’s talk and dread about a bokshi, a witch said to be at large in no-go areas of the forest. Saikia orchestrates multiple threads in the story, which could have easily slipped into mumbo-jumbo, with large-scaled purpose. As a storyteller, Saikia is unafraid of bold, spectacular leaps, aligning camerawork (Siddharth Sivasankaran and A. Vasanth) and sound design (Dhiman Karmakar) to evoke a thick, brooding atmosphere. Reddish hues fill the frame as a refrain intones: “the earth remembers”. Macabre, unearthly visions slice through in disorienting interruptions. Horror done right is all about unsettling, skin-curling undertones, terror playing peekaboo. In Bokshi, Saikia soars higher. Fusing intimacy of a fireside chat with rambling, heftier narratives, the film sweeps through reckonings between man a🍎nd nature, with scores to be settled. Occasionally, familiar beats in a trip-gone-awry arc sneak in, rife with abiding suspicion and apprehension. The length also strains. Nevertheless Saikia resists minimal gestures in fabricating the narrative, going for broke with a breathless, audaciously mounted climax: a vision of triumph and pure assertion.
Bokshi pre🎃miered aꦍt the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) 2025.
