Rapture Review: An Unblinking Probe Into The Perils Of Paranoia

The darkness that writer-director Dominic Sangma shines a light on in his second film, Rapture (Garo title: Rimdogittanga), is not only of the literal kind that descends when night sets in. It alludes, just as crucially, to the blind spots that are allowed to percolate into the minds and hearts of people to the detriment of their humanity.

The Indian-Chinese-Swiss co-production, a clear-eyed and unblinking probe into the perils of paranoia, premiered on Thursday in the Cineasti del Presente competition of the 76th Locarno Film Festival. The film explores what we selectively see, and choose not to see, when narrow considerations of community push us into the dark alleys of a siege mentality.

In Sangma's starkly delineated vision, darkness is a metaphor for the abnegation of the line that separates the morally acceptable from the ethically abhorrent. In the Meghalaya village where Rapture is set, the phenomenon takes on a disturbing dimension. Sangma's understated style blends the fictional with the subjective, the intimate with the universal to craft a portrait of what feels like a bad dream.

After he has accidentally witnessed an act of cruelty, the boy at the centre of Rapture has a feverish nightmare, a bout of delirium that sums up how we should all be feeling when the human cost of fear-mongering assumes shocking proportions.

Rapture is a follow-up to Sangma's critically applauded debut film MA.AMA (Moan). It ventures beyond the filmmaker's family - his first film was about his 85-year-old father who lives in the hope of being reunited with his dead wife in the afterlife-and into the wider space of the village where he grew up and where life revolves around the Church.

When the lights go out, the terror of the dark assails Kasan (Torikhu A. Sangma), a 10-year-old schoolboy who suffers from night blindness. It is through his eyes that the film interprets what happens in the dreadfully dodgy world of adults, in the daytime and at night.

In his innocence, Kasan, whose mother (Nadira N. Sangma) wants him to eat raw snails as a cure for his ailment, has no reason to be perturbed by events unfolding in the hamlet. But he isn't wholly oblivious to the prevailing air of unease that hangs over the world he inhabits. In one scene, Kasan and his granddad cut wood in the forest. A family of four - a bearded man (he is clearly an outsider), his wife and two children walk by. Kasan backs off a little. Is he fearful, too?

Sangma's screenplay and cinematographer Tojo Xavier's camera rustle up situations and haunting, expressive images that do not leave the audience in the dark. They make us painfully aware that there is something amiss in this pristine and idyllic forest. The landscape is captured in all its expanse and depth in the opening sequence that shows villagers collecting, in the still of the night, a rare breed of cicadas that appear in this part of the world once in two years.

It is pitch dark. Faint flickers of light appear on the screen like little amber dots as villagers with fire torches walk slowly towards the camera. Their activities intensify as they reach a clearing in the forest. The search for cicadas (which yield a delicacy, a fact that is revealed the next morning when Kasan's mother fries the night's catch and makes breakfast for the boy) ends with a piece of disconcerting news. A teenager has gone missing without a trace.

More unexplainable disappearances follow. Rumours of child kidnappers being on the prowl are now rife. People who do not belong here are suspected to be working for a hospital and stealing human organs for illegal transplants. Complaints are filed with the police station.

The villagers, on their part, form night patrol parties to keep watch on movements around their homes. A ray of hope amid the darkness: a statue of Virgin Mary is on the way to the parish. Will its arrival lead to the dispelling of the lurking dangers. But matters are aggravated when the pastor prophesies that the village will soon be plunged into apocalyptic darkness that will last eighty days. Only the candles will give light, he says.

Dread seeps into a community that is already on the edge. Fear of the other deepens and every stranger in the village is suspect. Doubts continue to persist in the minds of the villagers about who or what is responsible for the kidnappings - are they human intruders or forest spirits? The pastor counsels the villagers that faith in Virgin Mary will deliver them from evil.

Rapture is a piercing parable for our times and the village that the film plays out in is a microcosm of the larger world - it could be a city, a province or an entire nation - where communities commit atrocities on the pretext of ensuring peace and asserting solidarity of those that have the numbers to defend their acts of excessive force.

Someone asks: What are we afraid of? The question is posed in the wake of a drowning in the village lake. Sangma points to the pitfalls of crying wolf. A man asks, who is to blame: is it the woman who spread panic among the boys by yelling at them or are we all responsible for the tragedy?

Rapture creates an atmosphere of social anxiety and suffocation that is marked by a Thomas Vinterberg kind of intensity. But the film is also a sort of deeply personal cri de couer that is both tender and trenchant. It calls out the othering of outsiders and the conspiracies of silence and concealment that societies resort to when faced with uncomfortable dilemmas that threaten to blow the cover off their warts.

Can schisms of the kind that Rapture addresses ever be erased? One character in the film, a coffin maker, provides an answer. When he first hears the dire warning of the impending spell of darkness, he is worried stiff. He then changes his view. Apocalypse is welcome, he says. It will give us a chance to start over.

There is hope, but Rapture underlines that a new beginning in the world that we live in is not possible without destruction. That is the terrible truth that lies at the core of Sangma's visually captivating film.