Koimoi Recommends Paroksh: Imagine the presence of an unearthly element is observed in your vicinity, what is the first reaction of the eldest member of your family? Something to with a supernatural theory, that leads to a superstitious solution? Not for all, but at least the majority. But do we ever tend to look beyond superstition and fear, till someone makes us realise our misconceptions? Paroksh, a Tulu short film, talks about one such element and unravels the horror of an alien sound. Get along as I recommend you to watch this one on Koimoi Recommends this week. Also, it’s inspired by true events.
The premise is simple. One fine day a woman in a village in Mangalore hears a child crying in her farm. The sound is heard in the vicinity of one tree, but no one is to be found around. She informs her husband, who afterwards informs his brothers, who bring a priest. The crying still continues, and no one knows if it is the ghost or something else?
Ganesh Shetty, with his short film Paroksh, tries to take you to the heartland. Where houses are still from the sets of Malgudi days, technology has just touched the landscape, modernism is a concept looked at from far on, and the power dynamics between the man and the women is pre-credited. Amid all this appears, the crying sound and the horror begins.
Horror as a genre in Bollywood is sadly the least explored one. Don’t calculate it with the number of films. Count the ratio with the ones that really induced horror in you. The only film that I can instantly recall is Anushka Sharma’s NH10. Paroksh is a film where you don’t know the villain, not even its existence. The title itself means one that cannot be seen but exists.
Ganesh Shetty, with his stellar cast Amit Sial and Pooja Nayak, captures you with the word go. They are like us, ones from between us. Their reactions are what ours would have been. And with them, Shetty manages to show us the deeply rooted superstition in us. None of them looks out for logical reasoning; everyone tries to take refuge in the ‘puja’ that a priest does to eliminate the crying noise. But does that help? Watch Paroksh.
Ganesh manages to make you one of his characters and slaps you hard with the climax when you realise even you could not think of a reason like this. All this time, you were expecting a CGI’s ‘atma’ to pop out of the tree. But, facepalm! The camera department deserves at least a quarter of the credit to catch the frenzy and induce intrigue, acting department does the remaining job.
Paroksh is definitely not the most finely made short film. The characters are one tone and not layered. But that is not the purpose of the film. Watch out for the scene where the mother has already drawn a conclusion and given the crying noise a face in her dreams. A thing we all do but never realise how frightening it is.
Watch Paroksh to see how deeply rooted superstition is within us and looking beyond is a virtue not many of us have. But be aware the next time you hear an alien sound!
