During the opening credits of Kriya, on-screen text tells us that in Hindu tradition, it is the son who must be the one to perform a father’s last rites. We cut straight from this into a modern club scene: in this way, the film establishes straightaway that old and new India will find themselves in discord here. Kriya is a film which uses horror as a conduit to ask big questions about Indian cultural life. In some aspects – given the style of this treatment, and some of the themes which emerge – Kriya could be classed as an Indian Gothic.
Neel (Noble Luke), a DJ at the club, finds himself making meaningful eye contact across the dance floor with the beautiful Sitara (Navjot Randhawa). It’s a long sequence, brought down with a bump by the pair, some time later, trying to find somewhere to be intimate. Sitara suggests that they drive to her rather grand, though decaying family home – a dead ringer for the House of Usher – but Neel is suitably disbelieving that this could ever be okay with her family. Well, there’s certainly an issue to contend with, but not what he expects.
As the pair enter, they find Sitara’s father, prone and on the verge of death, surrounded by the other members of the family: mother Tara Devi (Avantika Akerkar), younger sister Sara (Kanak Bhardwaj) and holy man Panditji (Sudhanva Deshpande), whose interest in the family seems more than a strictly spiritual one. Rites are already being read over Sitara’s father, whose death is imminent; as eldest daughter, Sitara quickly begins to participate, as the rest of the family, rather begrudgingly given his outsider status, insist that Neel joins in with the prayers.
He begins to participate as best he can, but soon he’s struggling under the complex social and cultural norms of high-caste traditions such as these; this is exacerbated by Tara Devi’s anger at him as ‘improper’. Worse, it seems that Sitara bringing him here has been deliberately timed, given the length of her father’s illness and the vital importance of a male ‘family member’ to complete the rites. Neel wishes to leave, but nightmarish episodes of his own begin to afflict him, even whilst he gets increasingly drawn into this secretive family group.
The subtly off-kilter behaviour of this family, particularly evident between mother and eldest daughter, makes Kriya an almost immediately bewildering, discomfiting experience. Combined with the intricate finer points of religious practice, we are kept at a distance here – though the sheer weight of these, overwhelming in many respects, does become clearer as the film progresses. It’s important to note, though, that Neel is far more like the audience than he is like the family; he’s as alienated and taken aback by the goings-on of the evening as we are, and this helps to make him a very plausible outsider, someone with whom it is easy to empathise. There are other degrees of strangeness woven in here, some of which are potentially more shocking to Western audiences; our relationship to death is often rather distant, medicalised. Sitara’s tactile behaviour with the corpse of her father, cradling him, grabbing at him and later, completing acts which require her to open and close her father’s mouth, for instance – these things are not things we routinely do in the West. It adds significantly to the sense of unease.
Kriya is further notable for the way it seems at first to have positioned a man at the centre of its horror. Manipulated and effectively captured – albeit with language rather than physical force – Neel wants nothing more than to get away from this place, but he becomes trapped in a web of the expectations placed on males. The female characters, at least at first, seem to be in command; light touches, such as Sitara’s use of formal Hindi against Neel’s English, underline the gender and class differences between them, and in some respects, this is a subversion of expectations. However, when you understand more about the family’s motivations and the issues which afflict them, then it becomes apparent that here we have women using the means available to them to rally against an impossible situation, one that absolutely requires a male presence. This is one moribund gilded cage.
By its close, Kriya is a tale of fractured identities and the steady loss of personal control. The subversive elements used are far more than just ‘gotchas’, there to play with generic expectations; they’re wedded to the narrative, providing for a sometimes challenging but ultimately rewarding horror tale. Not every question in the film is answered, but Kriya is no less a film for that.
Kriya (2020) premieres at the Fantasia Film Festival on Wednesday 26th August 2020. For more information on the film, click here.