Bokshi (2025)

The story of Bokshi (2025) is, in essence, a simple one. For horror fans, it will also feel like a very familiar one: a young woman follows her mysterious destiny into the mountains and woods, where it turns out she’s linked by fate to ancient folklore. Along the way, there are interesting snippets and ideas to consider, and throughout, the production values on this film are very strong, with decent, committed performances. Its biggest problem stems from – to make an educated guess – its great personal importance to director and producer Bhargav Saikia as his first ever feature-length film. It’s taken five years to get it made. But Bokshi is close to three hours long, and it’s that epic runtime which dilutes its best ideas almost to the point of being negligible. A brutal edit would have improved this film tenfold; directors unable to forfeit even a few minutes of beloved footage, take note.

The labyrinthine nightmare which opens Bokshi, and the many folk horror friendly motifs which accompany it, belong to the nightmare of a young woman named Anahita (Prasanna Bisht). Believing her dreams (and her sleep incontinence) stem from PTSD over the loss of her mother, Anahita is often found poring over leaflets and information about the condition. School life is almost obligatorily hellish, and at home her grandmother proves a fierce matriarch who disapproves of her granddaughter’s histrionics, voting to send her off to boarding school rather than put up with it any longer. The histrionics are only compounded when the matriarch finds a makeshift altar and a depiction of some mysterious entity, hidden in the wardrobe. Anahita has procured all of these occult items from the Marai housemaid, giving granny an opportunity to lambast her not only for her belief in ‘black magic’ but for her class, her primitive culture. There are some tantalising moments which link class, ethnicity and occult belief here. But anyway, we’re off to boarding school, to meet some more dreadful teenagers – and a super-cool history teacher named Shalini (Mansi Multani) who shows an unusual interest in the new girl, taking her under her wing.

As she gets settled in and gets used to new bullying from different people, a lesson on an ancient stone labyrinth piques Anahita’s interest, and when it transpires that there’s a school trip heading there very soon, Anahita begs to be allowed to go. Of course she’s allowed: it looks exactly like the structure in her nightmares, and she is recalling more and more links between all of this and her late mother, who shared a fascination for the occult.

Much of the rest of the runtime of the film covers the trip into the wooded Himalayas, and it’s here that things really begin to falter. Whilst we do meet some new characters and get a sense of some unfamiliar religious, or magical beliefs, the downtime in-between these plot points is loose and unfocused. And, as much as the notion of shamanic communities promises much, it dawns on the viewer that, ultimately, this will be folk horror by numbers. Visions. Strange, feminine deities. Inescapable destiny. Mushrooms. Masks. The addition of features such as numbered chapters doesn’t help in all this, and anyone who has watched even a reasonable number of recent horror films would likely be tired of the chapters thing by now, which makes me think that the team behind Bokshi has seen a few films of this ilk, but not lots and lots. Not enough to notice the ubiquity of chapters, anyway. Elsewhere, we get acres of static shots, shots of the landscape, long snatches of accompanying music – lyrics and all – and even a few scenes which repeat. This kind of luxuriating over small details can contribute a good deal to atmosphere in the right sort of film, but given we later bolt on some very bloody, Ari Aster-style scenes, Bokshi was likely never intended as just a mood piece. For example, the sequence where Shalini gets Anahita to prove her ability to take on the hike to the labyrinth has her doing press ups and jumping jacks. Why all this? We know she’s going to be allowed to go. That, and there’s a multitude of Western eyebrow-raising safeguarding issues when a teacher lets a student into her house and plies her with liquor. Moments like these only unravel the narrative, and make implausible additions to boot. That runtime is racking up, and it needn’t.

There are some good elements along the way. As much as it can be tricky to unpick beliefs from beliefs, the mooted idea that folklore can only harm you if you know the stories is an interesting one in its own right. Lots of Western folk horror takes the opposite approach: uneducated outsiders get subsumed by entities and practices, whether they know about them or not. The settings are attractive, moving from ex-Raj India and its British hangover (the first school looks like an Anglican church) to a far more remote landscape, ungoverned by either past or present social rules. Linguists would be interested in the whys and wherefores of the code-switching between Standard English and Hindi, and in the newly-invented language of Boksirit (though of course you would likely miss that, if reliant on subtitles).

Some of the trippier elements are appealing, even if feeling oddly familiar to In The Earth (2021) – actually, the more I think of it, the more numerous scenes and structures look curiously akin to Wheatley’s film, but a lot of folk horror, when it comes down to it, turns out to be a palimpsest of similar ideas. You could be charitable and say this is because of a vast, shared folklore, which extends beyond regional and even geographical boundaries. Bokshi seems to suggest this in places, too, so if you’re amenable to it, it may be an appealing addition – as would the film’s overlay of feminist plot points and ideas, if you’re up for some political content. You just need ample patience.

Bokshi (2025) premiers at the International Film Festival Rotterdam on January 31st.