Cast: Adil Hussain, Sandhya Mridul and Rajshri Deshpande
Director: Vijay Jayapal
Rating: 3.5 stars (out of 5)
Chennai-based Vijay Jayapal's Hindi-language Nirvana Inn, propelled by the commanding presence of Adil Hussain and a pair of beguiling performances by Sandhya Mridul and Rajshri Deshpande, is a paranormal drama that probes the disturbed, depressed mind of a man fleeing a dark past.
The writer-director's deliberately paced sophomore venture employs a visual language that allows ample room for subtle ambiguities even when the narrative formulations eschew complexity. A man is wracked by moral anxiety in the wake of a tragedy. He is desperate to live down the incident. But it haunts him incessantly even after he travels to a place that is miles away from home.
One character whose presence in and around the Manali resort where the man now works visibly unsettles him says suggestively: "Main buri yaadein hamesha bhula deti hoon (I always erase bad memories)." The man wishes he could too.
Nirvana Inn uses genre elements extremely judiciously. It blends the conventions of a horror story (while eschewing jump scares, shrill sound effects and distorted camera positions) with folk tale rootedness. In the process, the film glides between the literal and the metaphorical.
Nirvana Inn is languid and low-key on the one hand and lacerating on the other. It conveys alarm and delirium without resorting to gimmicks. A hypnotic background score (Samanth Nag) brings into focus the emotional turmoil raging in a damaged soul.
Jogiraj (Adil Hussain) migrates from riverine Assam to mountainous Himachal Pradesh. He is a fish out of water. It is apparent that he is still grappling with the repercussions of an impulsive act he committed at a low point in his life. Remorse ripples in the depths of his despair, but the scars on his conscience refuse to heal.
Jogi speaks Hindi with a pronounced Assamese accent (Hussain, not surprisingly, does an absolutely stunning job; could any other actor we know have made the lines this character speaks more phonetically authentic and as culturally evocative?)
The film throws in a stray aside to underline the average northerner's inability to tell the northeast India apart from eastern of India. A policeman asks Jogi: Are you Bengali? His employer interjects: No, he is from Assam. It isn't clear if the cop is any wiser.
Although he is from a world apart, Jogi has a marked kinship with the equally mysterious Manohar, one of the principal figures in Jayapal's 2016 debut, the Tamil/English Revelations. Manohar, like Jogi, struggles to atone for a burst of violence that changed his life forever.
Jogi is a boatman/folk-dancer from the river island of Majuli who finds employment as a manager of a tourist resort in Manali. He is familiar with neither the location nor the calling but is constrained to make the effort to fit in. His boss asks if things are all right with him. He replies in the affirmative but without much conviction.
He puts up a brave face but he has too much gnawing at him. His greying beard, furrowed brows and deliberate gait tell a story. Jogi hears sounds, is stalked by a masked apparition and repeatedly runs into people and situations that thwart his efforts to move on. He is unable to sleep at night. People he thought he would never see again resurface at the resort, hastening his descent into insanity.
Their continuing, threatening presence in and around the resort surroundings, dominated by a male figure sporting a mask that denotes bibhatsya (horrific) rasa, threatens to push him over the edge. Other people from his past, including Mohini (Deshpande), a damsel he saves from being assaulted, reappear and push him further and further into despair and panic.
Another markedly less mysterious but eventually no less shadowy figure, Leela (Sandhya Mridul), a filmmaker who has been in the resort for an extended period of time researching for a horror film, begins to act too friendly with Jogi for the man's comfort.
In Revelations, Manohar is a Tamil writer who hasn't written a word for seven years and now lives in Calcutta in the hope of making amends for a rage-driven act. He is asked by a not-so-happily married woman he has developed a bond with: Do you like Calcutta? Manohar's reply is curt: "I like the solitude!
He probably means the anonymity and the possibility of starting over that a new city offers. That is exactly the motivation behind Jogi's shift to the hills. "God will always be with you," his dance guru tells Jogi. In the new surroundings, where the belief in evil spirits, women possessed and rituals of exorcism is deep-rooted, he isn't allowed to forget and move on. A change of location can only facilitate physical distance from a personal calamity and, possibly, the memory of it. But can it lead to complete erasure?
The theme of guilt binds Vijaypal's two films, which, in every other respect, are dissimilar. Revelations explored marriage, infidelity and female desire. Nirvana Inn probes one man's tormented psyche. In tone and texture, this film is a world apart from Revelations. As it is from the fiercely minimalistic recent Tamil-language films like To Let, Baaram and Nasir.
For a film located in the nether-world, Nirvana Inn represents a clear break from norm. The language is Hindi (and Assamese), but it could still be regarded as an addition to a new, exciting stream of highly individualistic films from Tamil directors.
In Nirvana Inn, image and sound are employed to unravel what might have brought Jogi to this pass. But the mystery lingers until the very end and the audience is allowed to use its imagination as the story unfolds. The 100-minute is in no hurry to unveil secrets.
Jogi's past is represented by the river back in Assam, his boat and the arena where he performed Bhaona, a folk-dance form delivering religious messages in a simplified, entertaining manner. In Manali, it is he who is at the receiving end of dire signals.
The two key actresses in the cast - Rajshri Deshpande is seductive and speaks in studied, sing-song tones, Sandhya Mridul is chirpy and cheerful until circumstances overtake her - are flawless foils for Adil Hussain, who raises the simple act of watching, or being watched, to the level of an immersive spectacle. The lead actor uses body feints, facial expressions and a gaze that alternates between the fixed and the shifty to convey Jogi's misery.
The quality of the performances and the finesse the director brings to the film make Nirvana Inn a class act.
(Nirvana Inn is available on the pay-per-view streaming platform Cinemapreneur for 99 hours from December 11)
