Not a fan of the horror genre, I was taken aback by how shaken I was with the business on hand in Bhog (in Bengali on Hoichoi) largely for its central performance. Actor Anirban Bhattacharya’s jolting performance as a working-class bloke who transforms into a possessed entity, right in front of our disbelieving eyes, echoes Jack Nicholson in The Shining.
There is an unsettling normalcy to Atin’s behaviour, his environment and his near ones at the start. Admittedly, Atin lost his mother when he was young. But he was more than compensated for by a mother-figure Pushpa (Sudipa Basu), whom Atil treats with a mixture of reverence and mischief.
How is he, or we, to know that Pushpa would disappear into thin air, literally with no forwarding address?
There is a chilling finality to the eerie happenings in this sturdily ominous fear feast, based on a short story by Avik Sarkar. Shantanu Mitra Neogi’s screenplay opens up the story, encrypts a lot of creepy atmospherics into the plot, and avoids all prevarication.
Actor turned director Parambrata Chattopadhyay, no stranger to tales told in restless repose, restricts the movement of the principal character largely in a modest suburban working-class home, so well-appointed it could be anyone’s cozy nest.
This sense of domestic comfort, the feeling of being at home, amplifies the horror that ensues, much like what happens to Revathy and her screen son in the Malayalam film Bhoothakaalam, where, like in Bhog, every corner of the house becomes a dreadful threat to the inhabitants.
Elementary question: why doesn’t Atin just leave the cursed home? Not so easy! The idol-worship, his mounting zeal for idolization, almost a parable for the fanaticism that is all around us, are all manifestations of his own unformed desire to be “possessed” to be owned by an extraneous presence. Some seek it in marriage. Atin finds it in idol worship.
The arrival of a mysterious, dangerous woman, Damri (Parno Mitra), coincides with the exit of the sweet, trustworthy Pushpadi from Atin’s life. It also signals his descent into a ritualistic hell best experienced rather than described.
I would like to make mention one sequence where Atin dances before the idol as a man gone far beyond redemption, as his horrified uncle watches from a corner. It is a moment shot with sliding grace; the shiver which runs up our spine is caught in furtive glances of ruinous import.
Parambrata shoots Atin’s eerie experiences through lenses that neither exaggerate nor underplay the enormity of the supernatural takeover, so we, the viewers, are caught in the middle of the unearthly possession in a way we haven’t experienced in recent times.
There is no extra meat in Bhog. It ambushes your attention and then refuses to let go.
