Screened at the 19th MAMI Mumbai International Film Festival.
Brilliantly titled SEXY D, this is a film for those who crib (or more often than not, brag) about not even flinching in anything under the genre of horror. This is scary till the last breath you take until the credits come up. Sanal Kumar Sasidharan holds you in, with his script-less world. He pulls away from showing irony by using the same set of characters. This guy is looking at a bigger picture. There’s a goddess being worshipped with gut-wrenching rituals – we don’t know where – and then we get to see the mockery of the entire idea of that worship in the story of our central characters – again, place unknown. One can’t go about questioning character decisions here, because this is a statement being made rather than a story being told.
A woman named Durga is feeling disturbed on a hitchhiked ride with 2 other men, which is in an omni that also has a miniature idol of Durga. The film is loud like that, but Sanal subverts all of it with his extremely raw sensibility. There’s no escape for us as much as the characters. The camera flows in a very unprecedented manner. It gets shaky, even out of focus at times – but these flaws work in the world Sanal paints on. Take the moment where rock music from the Omni jarringly overlaps the religious procession. It is tacky, but has immense impact for it’s purpose, just as the film on the whole. I liked this even better than Ozhivudivasathe Kali.
(The censor board has renamed the film to S. Durga, as if it makes it any less explicit. Now there’s place for more adjectives. Sultry, Sensual, call it what you want. But what the film stands for, won’t change.)