Swaha (In the Name of Fire) review | Death comes to Magadha

Part neorealist lament, part folkloric horror, Abhilash Sharma바카라™s Swaha (2024) begins and ends with death. Within its black-and-white frames, it hides a scathing indictment of class hierarchies, caste discriminations, and spiritual disillusionment. It is a crisp portrait of a lower-caste couple struggling to survive on the margins of rural Bihar. It takes a piercing look at how caste, gender, and hunger intertwine to haunt the living like a curse.

From its opening scenes, the visual and thematic parallels with The Seventh Seal (1957) create an atmospheric intensity. Shrouded figures move like omens across barren lands, while the stark lighting sculpts every face into a relic of suffering. But unlike Bergman바카라™s knight haunted by metaphysical questions, the characters in Swaha are burdened by the crushing weight of material reality. In Swaha바카라™s black and white embraces, death visits Magadha, where the land is dry, the gods are silent, and every labouring body seems engaged in a rhythmic, ritualistic dance with futility that reminded me of Anamika Haksar바카라™s Ghode Ko Jalebi Khilane Le Ja Riya Hoon (2018). Devendra Golatkar바카라™s cinematography turns each frame into a chiaroscuro elegy for the dispossessed.

Though Swaha presents itself as a story of maternal melancholy, it is also a compelling portrait of masculine exhaustion. The film follows Phekan (played with quiet intensity by Satya Ranjan), a daily wage labourer caught in a Sisyphean loop of job hunting, brick making, seed pounding바카라”actions performed with mechanical rhythm but no reward. Sharma바카라™s lens lingers on these tasks. These scenes are some of the film바카라™s most inviting ones, marked by their meditative reiteration. Phekan바카라™s journey is one of abject humiliation. It is also the film바카라™s emotional anchor. Phekan바카라™s wife, Rukhiya바카라™s anguish is more volatile, fragmented, and has echoes of the dissonance of a woman left behind, both physically and culturally.

Rukhiya, is portrayed with crazed urgency (sometimes teetering close to melodrama) by Sonalli Sharmisstha, who initially looks a tad too unbelievable as a starving mother unable to breastfeed her newborn. But Rukhiya embodies the film바카라™s thematic core. She is a woman on the brink, teased as a witch by villagers, experiencing a rapid descent into madness. In her othering is the reflection of real-world misogyny and casteist ostracism that has seen way too many burned at the stake.

The witch motif is potent in Sharma바카라™s fable. Rukhiya바카라™s broom, limp, light eyes, wild hair, and solitary rituals (where she calls out to her ancestors instead of the gods whose casteist devotees have abandoned her and her family) add to the imagery of the deranged hag living on the outskirts of the village. The film draws a deliberate line between historical accusations of witchcraft and the casteist and gendered violence of rural India. Her imagined hauntings, the full moon, the recurring crow are atmospheric tools that stitch the psychological and the supernatural. A momentary B-shot of a fly caught in a spider's web becomes a metaphor for the brutal hierarchy of the natural world and a distorted reflection of the unnatural pecking order of the world Phekan and Rukhiya live in.

Like the exiled Puritan family in Robert Eggers바카라™ The Witch (2015), Phekan and Rukhiya live on the fringes of society바카라”but here, it's not religious dogma but casteist disdain that pushes them to the barren edges beyond the village. Where Thomasin바카라™s family feared the devil, Rukhiya becomes the witch in the eyes of those who바카라™ve dehumanised her.

The sparse sound design enhances the hollowness of existential dread. Rhythmic chants and folk songs, crickets and chaos바카라”all coalesce into a soundscape that fuels the sense of unease further. Pain here masquerades as life and survival becomes a kind of ghost story. The film begins with a body and ends with a funeral, but it is what survives the flames that quietly redefines the story.

Phekan and Rukhiya바카라™s child, unnamed for much of the film, becomes less a character and more a vessel that carries the burden of lineage, survival, and inherited trauma. The supernatural elements render the film an almost mythic quality that comes with a resounding reminder that Phekan and Rukhiya바카라™s suffering is very much a part of an ancient, unending cycle. There is no space for morality lessons here because Sharma doesn't frame poverty as picturesque. Whether in Rukhiya바카라™s whispered appeals to her ancestors or the film바카라™s final gesture toward redemption, Swaha taps into the cyclical nature of life: what comes down, also goes up again. So, it is a tale of hope told through a story of despair.

Sharma's return to cinema after twelve years (after Achal Rahe Suhaag) is marked with a more refined visual language and a sharpened political gaze. He crafts a visually arresting parable about the lived horrors of caste and poverty, one where even fire (sacred in most traditions) offers no cleansing, only cremation. Drawing from Buddhist ideas of suffering and transience, he crafts a world where religion offers no solace to the disenfranchised, only a haunting kind of alienation.

Debiparna Chakraborty is a film, TV, and culture critic dissecting media at the intersection of gender, politics, and power.

Swaha is being screened at the Habitat Film Festival, New Delhi.