Kriya (Fantasia Fest)
**Seen for the 2020 Fantasia International Film Festival.
Neel doesn’t know what he’s getting into when he hooks up with Sitara at a night club where he DJs. But as he is spinning beats, the two lock eyes, and need one another. They start in the car, but Sitara isn’t comfortable. She wants to take him to her house. He has reservations because, “What about her family?” Oh, he does not know the half of it.
“Kriya” starts with a simple point of reference- in Hindu culture, it is tradition for the son to stand over the last rites of his father. As Sidharth Srinivasan’s creepy horror drama progresses, we understand more of where Neel (Noble Luke) fits into that. He has lost both of his parents- his father abandoned him and died alone, his mother in a hospital, begging Neel to take her home to die- and as the night progresses, those memories become important part of the tension in the film, as Neel feels as though he is imposing on Sitara’s (Navjot Randhawa) own mourning for her father, which they come home in the middle of. Sitara is insistent that he stays, though, because, in the absence of a male heir, Neel must perform those responsibilities. Eventually, he relents; he may come to regret doing so, however.
The first half of “Kriya” is really superb at developing the tensions in Sitara’s family, and setting up possibilities as far as what we might be able to expect in the second half of the film. I love the ways the family dynamics are written in this section, and how everything is done to put Neel on edge, from Sitara’s mother’s disapproval to her sister Sara seeming to be someone he can talk to to the role their house servant plays in the ceremony. The image of this family, around the patriarch’s body, and how it is treated, is striking and has a haunting energy to it even if nothing else supernatural happened in the film. The more overt horror elements come into play in the second half, and while it is compelling to see how Srinivasan uses them within the framework of the story he has set up, they aren’t quite as interesting as the potential of what we get in the first half of the movie. It holds our interest throughout, and regains that energy in the third act, when the ritual concludes in the morning, but some parts of the story in between those sections feel like plot mechanics and filler. There’s plenty of strength to Srinivasan’s ability to set mood, and build suspense, to get past that, however.
