Between catching the Prime Video series The Horrors of Dolores Roach and Aneel Kanneganti’s Hidimbha at the same time, I am convinced that cannibalism is not only fun to watch on the screen but also makes one ponder about a bunch of things. How is watching animals die on screen so painful while watching humans die with elements of gore and drama exciting? Why is the idea of consuming human beings so fraught with taboo when people eat dead animals with no remorse? (not my proposition, reiterating what was told verbatim in Dolores… and Hidimbha) Is something as natural and primal as hunger intimately connected to something equally natural and primal (but less agreed upon) concept like power? Cannibalism, which forms the backbone of Hidimbha’s story, is flush with symbolism and riveting urban legend. The Assamese film Aamis (also known as The Ravening) quickly comes to my mind when I want to recollect a great film centred around cannibalism. But sadly for Hidimbha, the gap between its ideas and execution is about as wide as the distance between Hyderabad and Guwahati.
Director – Aneel Kanneganti
Cast – Ashwin Babu, Nanditha Swetha, Sanjay Swaroop, Shijju, Rajeev Kanakala, Srinivasa Reddy, Shubhalekha Sudhakar
For a film that displays a handmade tribal mask whenever helpless humans are about to be gutted for dinner, the visual metaphor that stayed with me strongly is the sight of cameras. We see them trailing people as drones, guiding them safely. We see them as CCTVs continuously helping police officers with numerous investigations. Being watched by police by cameras set all over the city is seen as a force of good in films like Hidimbha, in stark contrast to the criticisms levied against Hyderabad by activists for the city’s rising levels of techno-surveillance. Through the use of cameras, we see police officers headed by Aadhya (Nanditha Swetha) and Abhay (Ashwin Babu) trying to solve the case of women being abducted in large numbers. The story then spans through timelines galore to get to the bottom of the mystery.
Make no mistake, Aneel Kanneganti is a director who wants to be taken seriously. Hidimbha has these flashes of excitement popping off the screen, be it in the visual of an owl gazing intensely to show slaughter or certain ambitious shots where the camera strives to rise above its functionality or the craftful use of the kuleshov method to throw people off their tracks with timelines and a hip flask (don’t ask). Novelty is this film’s primary mode of persuasion.
There is also a Daako Daako Meka-style philosophical analogy shoehorned in a couple of places, that comes across less as the characters justifying their proclivity to cannibalism and more as the filmmaker giving us a peek into what he trips on. But Hidimbha takes many steps backwards from the edge-of-the-seat thriller title by a taxing, uneconomic pace and its futile attempts at heroism. Heroism is not something that can be added or removed like a piece of clothing, it is something that a film needs to have fitted in organically, like a body part. When Viraj surges ahead to decimate the film’s bad guys in slo-mo, he looks about as disposable as a dress and not as unbreakable as a body part. And how is the audience supposed to buy his heroism after his character comes out as something else entirely in its final portions?
There are more narrative misfires in this film. Sample this, there is a KGF-style ghetto in Hidimbha’s Hyderabad named Kala Banda (no prizes for guessing which colour the area is painted in) that is filled with evil people. Just in case you are not convinced about their ‘evilness’ there is a shot of the goondas in Kala Banda doing Namaaz. There is also an offhand remark about how nobody speaks Sanskrit in Kerala because it is full of Christian colleges which comes off as odd, especially since it does not lead up to anywhere. But when Hidimbha ends, you know the film’s really given up on its own case. Why resort to preachiness, when you can have something more ambiguous and exciting like Aadhya carrying the generational curse Abhay and his father did? The film chews up its delicious cruelty a bit by bit, and that feels about as wrong as cannibalism.
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