The key event in Burning (2024) is revealed to the audience in the opening moments: a house is on fire in a small Kyrgyzstani town, and we arrive just as the fire brigade also arrives. In the aftermath of the blaze, a group of neighbours meet up with one another in a local shop, where they soon start discussing both the fire and the events which led up to it. But there is, they all concur, something odd about the house shared by husband Marat, wife Asel and, occasionally, Asel’s mother-in-law Farida.
Talk turns to the possible reasons for the house’s strange qualities, and this is the cue for the film to present different versions of the same story via different people’s experiences, ideas and memories of the couple. We move back in time, at first following Marat as he meets his mother at the local station; she’s come equipped for this visit, bringing a selection of various herbs which she says “never leave her”, and before long she’s seen praying over the property as if to ward off some evil. First impressions are not set in stone in this film, but nonetheless, our first impression of Farida is of a formidable woman, and someone rather scathing of her family’s behaviour since they suffered a bereavement. They lost their young son Amir a year previously, but, happily Asel is pregnant again, and the family should be in a position to look forward – this, however, does not seem to be the case.
The film then begins to suggest supernatural forces at play in the house, though in the first version of events, they only seem to afflict Asel. No one else experiences what she experiences. Farida begins the process of ritually cleansing both the home and, essentially, her daughter-in-law too, believing that something unholy is manifesting through her – some malign force linked to her grief, and her inability to follow cultural norms and beliefs surrounding both bereavement and childbearing. It is far from easy, seeing what this heavily-pregnant woman is soon being put through, but is it as straightforward as it seems? Is Asel simply being controlled and dismissed by turns, by people who should have her best interests at heart? Or, is there indeed something unholy here?
Burning starts very simply, even a little crudely, but it soon shows firm control of its storytelling, adding in layers of complexity. Whatever impressions you get from the first rendition of the story (and here’s an example where dividing the story into three chapters with intertitles makes thematic sense), you likely won’t retain them in their first form. Characters change, emphases shift, and the audience is given the task of sifting through these events, making sense of what is real and unreal. There are a few mentions made of things like herbs, amulets and – by extension – rituals, probably age-old cultural practices which have become enmeshed with Islam, in similar ways to how Western folklore has co-evolved with Christianity; these cultural beliefs and practices are perfectly clear, however, or where they’re less clear they’re explained in the script, perhaps with one eye on the possibility of an international audience.
What needs no explanation, sadly, is the misogyny explored in the film, because it operates as a kind of bedrock; it makes the film a tough watch in places, and the odd dash of more sentimentalised content certainly doesn’t detract from that discomfort. Of course, much of this is intended to distress and to point to very real failings in wider society, but perhaps it’s that shared language of conceptions about women that gives the film its clearest, most unequivocal horror: we’ve seen and heard all of this enough to see it clearly, and in any culture.
Refracted through different voices in the local community, Burning forges interesting connections between grief, family and the supernatural, right down to looking at the significance and purpose of supernatural belief: can it, too, be exploited? The film is able to shift audience loyalties around very successfully: it’s a surprising and affecting experience, a reminder that perspectives can differ and also that that communities may choose to see what they want to see, overlaying their own beliefs and impressions onto a place or a group of people, often in detrimental ways. This is a clever film, artfully structured and thought-provoking.
Burning (2024) appeared at the Fantasia International Film Festival on August 1st.