Anahita (Prasanna Bisht) is a seventeen year old girl who has frequent terrifying nightmares relating to an incident she was caught up in involving her shaman mother as a young child, which led to her mother disappearing. After a violent encounter with a bully at her school, her grandma decides to send Anahita away to a boarding school, thinking the change in scenery could help her get over her past trauma. It is at this new school that she encounters captivating history club teacher Shalini (Mansi Multani), and takes an instant shine to the woman due to her lessons talking about folklore related to the type of beliefs her mother's side of the family practised. Learning that Shalini is going to take a select group of students on a fieldtrip to a mysterious prehistoric site deep in a remote forest, Anahita convinces the teacher to let her come along as well, as again, it relates to the type of thing her mother had believed in. Things begin well, but after Shalini decides to ignore the advice of the guides and head into a part of the forest that the locals believe to be cursed by an ancient witch known as the Bokshi, the carefully planned field trip begins to fall apart.
I always make notes when watching a film for review, and this time around those notes are many! After an arthouse style prologue that sees the screen bathed in a red tint as discordant images are edited together, things settle down. Being so long, the film is split into seven distinct chapters with intelligently placed beginnings and ends. For instance, chapter one ends with Anahita heading off to boarding school, while later on, chapter five sees the hapless group entering the forbidden part of the forest. This does feel like a long and lengthy movie, but thinking of it all, I was hard placed to be able to identify anything added just to extend the run time. There was always something going on, whether the trippy sequence that saw two shamans separated by distance battling each other via magic (really gave me vibes of the wizard battle between Gandalf and Saruman in The Lord of the Rings!), or the frequent nightmare flashback sequences Anahita suffers with. The pure length of the film helped to really make the group's trek deep, deep into the forest feel like a real journey, adding the impression of it feeling like they really are far away from any type of help. While traditionally shot rather than found footage, I did get a real The Blair Witch Project vibe to this, though the supernatural elements here are shown to be genuine with many characters experiencing the effects of that part of the film. A lot of this was atmosphere and build-up, again with the references to other films, I got more than an echo of The Ritual in the way the characters keep stumbling across unsettling offerings. This ramping up of tension leads to a decent payoff with a quite insane final act that with forty five minutes to go, saw the bubbling madness finally boil over, before simmering down to another red tinted arthouse sequence for the film's ending. One that added elements that felt similar to Midsommar, and used elements of the Bokshi as an analogy for female empowerment.
Characters were a varied bunch, and settled down to a key set once the story really gets going. There are seven students, five girls and two boys, some of which have been on previous field trips with their history club teacher. Then there are three local guides, Shalini and another teacher, Meryak (Bhasker Pradhan). Of course, being the protagonist, Anahita had a lot of development to her character, the main draw being exactly what happened to her when she was a child that could have possibly opened her up to being possessed by a Bokshi. Shalini was a much more mysterious character, her behaviour became more of a type of cult leader, constantly convincing the group to press forward, and acting very strangely the deeper the group got. I personally thought Meryak was the best character here, a man with an impressive moustache and a voice of reason who is forced to accept his world view isn't correct when the myths and legends he sees as being silly begin to come to life around him. Right up until the end this stern teacher was trying to do the best by his pupils, Meryak - I salute you! Outside of a core four or five, the other key characters didn't have as much to them, the two male students mainly kept outside the story, while two of the girls only defining characteristics were that they were identical twins.
Special mention has to go to Advait Nemlekar who created both the songs and background score, an unnerving rustic tribal sound that was a perfect fit.
Bokshi is a horror that feels long, but it also was something that really drew me in. The unique Indian setting set itself apart in terms of looks, while the story was something that I found a little confusing, but there was enough provided to give you at least a vague idea of what was going on. The film looked quality, just a couple of effects that looked a little CG, and it was a bit distracting having the myths and legends play out as a series of animated hand drawings, but that saved on cost, and fitted that these would have been stories passed down before the advent of technology. I was impressed with the atmospheric folk-horror that was on display here, and regardless of the big ask in terms of time, this was something I was very happy I got to see. Bokshi had its world premiere on 31st January at the Rotterdam International Film Festival.
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Excellent review! But may I suggest one correction? Meryak (played by Bhasker Pradhan) was the shaman. The name of the second teacher was Avinash, played by Sandeep Shridhar Dhabale.
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