Sruthi Ganapathy Raman
It is established in the opening sequence of Prime Video’s The Village. Blood is spilled and body counts keep spiralling when an untoward incident rocks the life of a family hurrying on the isolated roads of Thoothukudi in the dead of the night.
The director does this with an imagination so incandescent that more than the actual deaths, we’re intrigued by how creatively these deaths are written — something we’re only used to seeing in international Zombie outbreak films.
The worldbuilding in The Village is exquisite. We don’t just see a mutant monster lunge to kill a person, but also see them pick apart the corpse to feed his brothers. The Graphic Novel is of the same name By Shamik Dasgupta.
Preethisheel Singh D’Souza’s makeup artistry and Rembon Balraj’s production design are phenomenal in a show that deals so often with bloody mutated creatures and abandoned villages with Demogorgon-like trees, a premise that could’ve easily become tacky.
The series keeps challenging our notions of goddesses and rituals, by posing uncomfortable questions — the peak of which culminates in episode 5, leaving you stirred.
The Village provides us with some of the most unsettling, gut-churning scenes, not every shot is able to hold the tension that the mise-en-scène is able to. It also doesn’t help that the dialogue isn’t too effective.