'Devi' short film review: A hard-hitting, brilliant film to send chills down your spine

Director: Priyanka Banerjee
Cast: Kajol, Mukta Barve, Neena Kulkarni, Neha Dhupia, Rama Joshi, Sandhya Mhatre, Shivani Raghuvanshi, Shruti Haasan, Yashaswini Dayama
Genre: Drama
Duration: 13 mins 01 secs

Reviewer rating: 4.5 out of 5

Setting the scene

The short film opens with nine women in a room. Each one of them goes about minding their own business and careful enough to not get into another's way. The women are spread out comfortably inside a living room which also has a TV set. Each of these women has a different mindset and belong to different strata and generations of society. Forced to live with each other, they find it difficult to adjust with each other's needs and space.  

Plot 

Once the scene is established, the nine exasperated women begin by showing their discomfort in being forced to live together against their wishes. Pulling at that thread, the short film exceptionally manages to inject in the deadly and collective common point that brings them all together. The climax of the film is reached with the bone-chilling realisation that these women are, in fact, rape survivors and are trapped in desolation probably after they were 'silenced' by patriarchy. The stimulus introduced by the writer is the anticipation of another person in an already overcrowded and stuffy room. The women pointlessly argue with each other whether they would be able to accommodate another person like themselves. The film culminates with a gut-wrenching revelation that is bound to befuddle you with thoughts of helplessness, shame and a sense of impotent empathy.

Verdict

This wonder of a short film deserves applause for the relevance of the subject that it dealt with so poignantly. 'Devi' leaves you tongue-tied with the realisation that we live in a society where incidents like sexual violence and suffering of women is a collective reality for many. Some endure it bravely, while others succumb to the pressures of keeping up with the label of 'devi' ascribed to women in India. 

There is no escape from this room with nine women who represent the nine forms of the goddess we ritually celebrate as a 'tradition' in India. The short film represents an allegory of the condition of women -- irrespective of their caste, class, ideology, age, education, clothes, disability-- in our country. The closed room is the only safe haven for a woman who is forced to go through gruesome violence and then expected to remain silent. How many more of these women will fit into a closed room? 

When an unexpected addition knocks on the door in the film, the women begin to make hair-raising revelations about the crimes perpetrated against them, all in an attempt to have a right to stay indoors. They compare the severity of the crimes on different scales but somehow end up with no consensus. Their complaints and horror stories can only be understood by someone who can, unfortunately, empathize with them and those are the other women in the room-- no one else. The sisterhood must be maintained in order for them to face what's on the other side of the door. 

Kajol, who leads the cast, plays the warrior housewife who tries to balance the dwindling temperaments churning in the room. She describes the age of the perpetrators who brought her in the room. Shruti Haasan plays the party-girl who describes how the predators left her after being beaten up with a beer bottle. Mukta Barve plays the fully clad Muslim woman, Yashaswini Dayama is the mute village girl, Neena Kulkarni and the others are old women while Neha Dhupia plays the role of an office going corporate woman. The story manages to stab you in the heart with the twist in the end and then forces you to breathe with the realization that reality, like the one on the screen, does, in fact, exist. The director should take a bow for bringing out such a sensitive subject with the utmost simplicity through the short film.

What works

• The simplicity of the narrative and the set-up that amplified the evocation of poignancy horror at the end.

• The brilliance of the performers in conveying a range of unspoken words with their presence, with minimal dialogues.

• The length of the film which drove the point to the T in a tightly written script and impeccable screenplay.

What doesn't work

• The story would make more sense in the form of a theatre piece and not as a film as the dialogue delivery of the actors is clearly and strictly according to their roles. 

• The heated discussion between the characters and their reactions, even though to bring out the tension, sounds inorganic at one point.

• The point about sorting the women according to the different criteria of their predators was a little problematic and could've been handled in a different way.

Watch the short film here: