Maya
**Seen during the 2022 Renegade Film Festival.
I interviewed K/XI at the festival. You can read that here.
The past looms large in both of K/XI’s feature films as a writer/director. In “Black Lake,” it’s a past imprinted on a gift; in “Maya,” it’s a past forgotten that is coming back to the surface. In both cases, the past all but assures their future is null and void. Neither main character did anything to deserve this fate; that’s the cruel after effect of trauma remembered- it haunts you, and sometimes, it won’t let go.
When I first saw “Black Lake” in 2020, it was deeply affecting, and profoundly exciting as an act of filmmaking; repeat viewings throughout the rest of the year only confirmed that initial feeling. K/XI started making “Maya” earlier, but it feels like a natural follow-up to that film. If it’s more conventional in its narrative, it remains as affecting, and powerful, in its craft and emotional impact, in part because it seems to come from not just the same voice, but the same place in what it wants to say, even if it’s approach is different. That’s the mark of a great storyteller, and one that isn’t afraid to push themselves in different directions.
Maya (Madiha Hidayat) wakes up one day with blood on her sheets. Intellectually-speaking, we have a sense of what that means for a young girl like herself, but as she continues to be haunted by memories, and unusual happenings, we cannot be too sure whether that’s truly the case here. She is never really herself after that, and she has difficulty speaking to her adopted sister, Kalika (Ramsha Shaikh), or her adopted mother (Intezaar Fatimah), about it. She has trouble eating, and she’s getting unusual calls from her birth mother (Shumaila Nofil). But her birth mother doesn’t have her number here, and all she is saying is simple- “When are you going to come home?” As Maya’s health gets worse, Kalika is about to track down Maya’s older sister, Muskaan (played by the director herself). Will she have the answers Maya seeks?
There’s an opening sequence that hints at what is to come in “Maya.” Maya and Muskaan are playing in their childhood house. One day, Muskaan comes down with unsettling facial scars. What happened? You probably have a pretty good idea of that yourself, but the question we leave ourselves wondering isn’t “what happened” but “why” it happened. The film doesn’t entirely answer that question, but it doesn’t really need to- the most important part in all of this is that Maya, at this moment, is starting to remember. “Maya” is cut from the same cloth of horror as “The Shining” and “Ringu” and “The Grudge,” but I also found myself thinking of “Outrage,” the Ida Lupino film. In it, a young woman is raped, and throughout the rest of the film, she is struggling with the after effects of that trauma. For Maya, those after effects of what happened when her and Muskaan were kids are delayed, and they aren’t intended to be from the same event, but as Maya struggles with her sanity, the empathy we feel for her is strong. Her choices up to the end make sense because we feel that connection, however sad we feel when they are made.
As with “Black Lake,” “Maya” is beautifully made, and moves with a strong sense of momentum. It’s also a bit more of a slow-burn, and the way that K/XI is able to find the balance between that seeming contradiction- momentum and slow-burn- is what makes her such a fascinating storyteller. The depth of image, and the contrast between light and dark, in her cinematography brings to mind Tarkovsky and Lynch, while the intricate psychological aspects of the story speak to works from Bergman. And even if it isn’t as prevalent as the score in “Black Lake,” the soundtrack gives us pieces by Andres Oddone, Sahale, Azam Ali and Ramin Loga Torkian that have the same impact when they enter the equation.
In thinking about how to wrap up this review, a filmmaker came to mind whose work had a profound impact on me, because it didn’t feel like anything else I had seen before. That filmmaker is Alex Proyas. “The Crow” was ground zero for starting me on the path to loving films the way I do, and after “Maya” and “Black Lake,” some of the same reasons I love Proyas’s work, and why it connected with me, keep coming up in thinking about K/XI as a filmmaker. Her use of music. The originality of her vision. The way she creates images I cannot get out of my head. And the way she is able to use quick strokes to define characters on the page, and let the actors flesh it out from there. Every film Proyas makes is an event for me. I feel like that’s going to be the same with K/XI. I may not like all of her films the same way I do these two, but I know I’ll get something interesting every time out.
