"Horror is like a serpent; always shedding its skin, always changing. And it will always come back. It can't be hidden away like the guilty secrets we try to keep in our subconscious," said Italian filmmaker Dario Argento. The quote beautifully articulates the meaning and objective of horror. By drawing an analogy with a serpent, Argento acknowledges that horror continues to evolve in conflux with the supernatural, while the next line elucidates how horror's influence on one traces back to one's psyche, thereby inferring what constitutes horror on both a wider and personal level. For those unfamiliar with Argento's work, the filmmaker's most renowned work is Suspiria, the first in The Three Mothers trilogy, which also includes the lesser-known Inferno and The Mother of Tears.
While each film in Argento's The Three Mothers trilogy is dedicated to a witch – an explicit representation of a female indulging in the dark side of mystics – Bhaskar Hazarika's Kothanodi (The River of Fables), on the other hand, is an eldritch take on motherhood that tells the stories of four women, and it can and must be proclaimed 'The Four Mothers'. Produced four years before his sophomore effort Aamis brought him into the limelight, it is the convergence of the supernatural and the real, which seamlessly delves into tenebrous depths of convoluted human nature.
Kothanodi is obscure enough to make us incline towards the supernormal elements to seek answers, lucid enough to keep us intrigued by the human actions, and most importantly, pure enough to instigate emotions along with the characters. Humans dying and being hurt in brutal ways is a trick most horror films are habituated to in order to keep the viewer engaged. However, seldom does a horror film succeed in inculcating two of the most vital emotions which cement our emotional investment: anger and sadness. Kothanodi is that rare film in which the horror emanates from our concern towards a character more than the creepiness it is suffused with.
Based on four folk stories from Burhi Aair Sadhu (Grandma's Tales), compiled by prominent Assamese playwright Lakshminath Bezbaroa, Kothanodi is essentially a study of human nature, set in an outwardly scenic countryside that inwardly thrives on spookiness. Owing to its time period – pre-colonial India – when black magic and superstitions were rampant, the film builds a preternatural universe in which characters find wickedly creepy instances normal. For instance, in one of the stories, Keteki (Urmila Mahanta) gives birth to an outenga (elephant apple) which keeps rolling behind her wherever she goes. After being labeled a witch and banished from her village, a perplexed Keteki goes ahead with her life, continually followed by her child, the outenga. Although it sounds ludicrous as an idea, it is emotionally captivating and visually splendorous, majorly attributed to Hazarika's treatment, which is a confluence of magical realism and social critique, instead of full-blooded fantasy.
In the curious case of Keteki, Hazarika chooses the path to build up towards the unraveling mystery, while parallelly hinting at the way a woman is perceived by the world when she is dissimilar to what nature expects from her. Since this is not an anthology and characters from the four different stories overlap with each other, this treatment reflects in all stories, which are strange, sinistrous, and shocking in equal proportions. The wicked tales include: a woman named Senehi (Zerifa Wahid) plotting the murder of her step-daughter Tejimola (Kasvi Sharma), while her husband Devinath (Adil Hussain) leaves on a trip; another woman named Dhoneshwari (Seema Biswas) planning to get her daughter married to a python, hoping the marriage will gift her a fortune; the last one involves Malati (Asha Bordoloi) who, having lost her first three newborns after her husband's uncle ordered their sacrifice, is now trying to save her fourth child from her husband and his uncle's prophesy.
Akin to the titles of the three mothers – Lady of Darkness, Lady of Tears, and Lady of Sighs – of Argento's trilogy, the four mothers of Kothanodi can be called:
Keteki: Lady of Longing, as she yearns to relish motherhood.
Senehi: Lady of Loath, considering her hatred towards her daughter.
Dhoneshwari: Lady of Greed, owing to her greediness that outweighs concern for her daughter.
Malati: Lady of Sorrow, having lost her three newborns due to the prophecies of the men in her life.
Unlike Argento's women, none of Hazarika's women are witches, although Keteki is branded one, and Senehi comes closest to evil. Senehi, too, is an immoral human, not an enchantress. This is where the film draws a line between humans and non-humans. Not every human is humane; not every non-human aspect is ghastly.
Furthermore, these ladies have men in their lives, but they are out of the spotlight. The protagonists and antagonists of the film are women, and it's nothing short of ground-breaking that Kothanodi's world is a woman's world, like a film telling female stories should rightfully be. Women make the decisions, they execute actions, and they experience the repercussions. Hazarika ensures that the film is only about women. The men in Kothanodi are feeble and voiceless, and never make a mark. With Indian mainstream cinema romanticizing the portrayal of men as the saviors of women, it is both satirical and pragmatic to watch a father sleeping while his daughter is dying a painful death in the next room. "Saviour who?" asks Hazarika.
All the stories have a layer of ominous mysticism that often pierces into realism by leveraging the relevance. Perhaps what's more chilling about appalling outcomes in a couple of stories is that they are attributed to human nature more than the mysterious elements at play. Two out of the four stories end on a dreadful note – resulting in brutal deaths of main characters – and both these horrifying consequences are propelled by normal human beings, while the other two stories, where paranormal forces are at play end on a positive, hopeful note. It is an astute way of saying that humans are exponentially more menacing than spectral ghosts.
Kothanodi is an unorthodox horror film that simultaneously abides by and shatters genre convictions. For instance, all the important set pieces occur at midnight, a horror film's favorite time. Contrarily, all the dreadful consequences are caused by humans, not supernatural entities.
When a horror film goes beyond the scares we signed up for and delivers a story, characters, and commentary that are burnt in our memory long after watching it, it becomes more than just a scary film: it becomes a great horror film. Kothanodi is the latter and much more. And you will never look at an outenga the same way after watching Kothanodi.