Songs of Forgotten Trees review – sensitive, ambiguous drama of female intimacy in Mumbai

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A sex worker and a call centre employee forge an ambiguous relationship in a film of strong feelings In a tiny crumbling Mumbai apartment two women move around each other, squeezing into the kitchen to cook, or past one another in the hallway. The cramped space hems them in – just as society limits their choices. That is surely the point first-time director Anuparna Roy is making in a gentle drama set mostly in the apartment about the closeness that develops between the two women. One of the roommates is Thooya (Naaz Shaikh), an actor and part-time sex worker. The apartment belongs to a client, Nitin (Bushan Shimpi), an arrangement that outrages the neighbours. Thooya doesn’t care what they think, and has rented the second bedroom to a stranger, Shweta (Sumi Baghel), who works from home for an IT call centre. There is an awkwardness between them at first that develops into … what exactly? Romance? It looks that way, although the film’s final scene is ambiguous. Continue reading... f...
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It Lives Inside review – standard-issue schlock horror has its moments

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This Indian American monster movie has interesting touches of cultural specificity but it’s a mostly familiar formula

There’s a swirl of the old and the new in the hokey pre-Halloween horror It Lives Inside, a balance that could have benefited from a lot more of the latter – because when the first-time director Bishal Dutta does try to add freshness to the familiarity of formula, he manages to carve his film its own place within two overstuffed subgenres, flashes of intrigue as he veers between schlocky curse and even schlockier monster movie.

A wide-releasing horror film centered on an Indian American teenager already gives the film a certain distinction. Dutta, also acting as writer, tries to thread themes of assimilation and identity through a predictable procession of mostly ineffective jump scares and slightly more effective set pieces, the film working better when it’s trying to chill rather than shock. Never Have I Ever and Missing’s Megan Suri plays Samidha, or Sam as she prefers to be called, a girl trying to fit in at a predominantly white high school despite her mother keenly trying to keep traditions an integral part of her life. It’s led to a distance from her other Indian American friend, Tamira and, like Heathers and Fright Night before it, explores that interesting fracture of leaving one friend behind to climb higher socially.

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