Bulbbul
Synopsis:
Dr. Satya is literally screaming bloody murder at a woman walking on the ceiling because her feet are backwards and it is completely terrifying and honestly why does this keep happening in these kinds of atmospheric hindi movies.
Okay so let us just back up a second because this is Bulbbul and it is a super creepy supernatural period piece that dropped on Netflix and completely changed what we expect from modern bollywood releases that usually just stick to the same tired romance formulas.
Tripti Dimri plays this little girl named Bulbbul who gets married off to a much older, wealthy landlord named Indranil who has twin brothers named Satya and Mahendra, and wait, Rahul Bose actually plays both Indranil and the abusive, mentally unstable twin Mahendra which is wild because he plays both characters and one is cold and distant while the other is just a walking disaster of jealousy and rage.
Bulbbul is just a kid when she gets married, and she spends her nights listening to spooky bedtime stories told by her brother-in-law Satya about a chudail, a tree-dwelling witch with reversed feet, and they form this tight, innocent bond of reading and playing together until suddenly years pass and Avinash Tiwary shows up as an adult Satya who has just returned from studying law in London.
Look, by the time Satya comes back home, everything is completely ruined and toxic because Indranil has become a bitter recluse, Mahendra has been driven half-mad by his awful, cruel wife Drigbala, and Bulbbul is now this gorgeous, powerful lady of the mansion who rules the estate with absolute confidence, and honestly I could not stop staring at the incredibly heavy, intricately embroidered red sarees she wears throughout the entire movie because they must weigh like fifty pounds.
Satya notices that things are totally weird and people are dying left and right in the village because men are getting brutally murdered in the dark woods by some unseen supernatural force, and the villagers are all whispering about the chudail coming back for revenge.
Right in the middle of all this rising tension and murder, we hit the interval point where Satya gets kicked out of the house by Indranil because Indranil gets way too jealous of the close, lingering friendship between adult Bulbbul and Satya, and honestly bollywood movies always love a good dramatic banishment right before the intermission.
And then boom, Satya leaves for five years, and during his absence, absolute hell breaks loose at the ancestral haveli because Mahendra tries to assault Bulbbul one night, and she fights back, but then Indranil and Mahendra horribly torture her, breaking her feet and leaving her for dead in the forest.
That is the exact moment she turns into the literal tree-dwelling spirit with backwards feet who starts slaughtering all the abusive, predatory men in the region to protect women and kids, which is such a powerful vibe for modern hindi films even if it gets really gory.
Satya finally returns years later, completely oblivious to what actually happened to her, and he tries to play detective to prove that a human being couldn't possibly be doing these magical killings, even though the local doctor tells him straight up that monsters are real.
Drigbala and Indranil have fled the house in terror, leaving the estate basically abandoned except for Bulbbul and her loyal servant, and Satya starts digging into the past and discovers bloody clothes and hidden evidence that implicates his own family members in unspeakable cruelty.
He confronts Bulbbul in the middle of a foggy night after seeing her walk on the roof with her reversed feet, and she openly confesses to him that she is the monster hunting the wicked men of the village, breaking his entire worldview in half because he realizes his beloved childhood friend is the very creature everyone is terrified of.
Mahendra sneaks back onto the property to finish what he started years ago, trying to burn Bulbbul alive, but her supernatural powers kick in completely, and she traps him in the burning wreckage of the stables.
Satya watches helplessly as Bulbbul uses her supernatural strength to deal with Mahendra once and for all, ending the reign of terror that his own family inflicted upon her.
The movie ends with Bulbbul standing on the roof of her mansion in the bright morning sunlight, looking down at Satya with a haunting, bittersweet smile before leaping gracefully up into the lush green trees and vanishing into the canopy forever.
Rahul Bose wearing two mustaches at the same time is not necessarily what sinks a movie, but it definitely gives you something to look at while you figure out where the plot went. Anvita Dutt’s directorial debut wants to be a feminist fable wrapped in velvet and dipped in blood, which is a fine ambition for any filmmaker working in the current ecosystem of Hindi films, but ambition often gets tangled up in lighting gels and fog machines. You can feel the sweat behind the art direction, every crimson tree branch placed with such heavy-handed care that the forest stops breathing. It's a small thing, but it bugged me how every single lantern in nineteenth-century Bengal apparently burned at maximum wattage with zero flicker.
Tripti Dimri stands in the middle of all this glowing upholstery and somehow manages to keep her pulse. She plays Bulbbul, first as a child bride with oversized silver payals dragging across marble floors and later as the mysterious mistress of a large, brooding estate where men keep turning up with their ankles snapped backward. There is a specific kind of stillness Dimri brings to the second half of the picture, sitting on a swing with her hair undone, her feet dangling just inches from the dust, looking bored by the carnage around her. She isn't doing much with her face, just watching from the corner of her eye while characters played by Avinash Tiwary run around shouting exposition into the dark. It reminds me a bit of how Rakhee Gulzar used to hold a frame without blinking, anchoring nonsense with pure gravity.
The script is where things start leaking air. Dutt treats every single theme like it’s written on a billboard, making sure the audience understands that patriarchy is bad and men who abuse their power deserve to be dragged into trees by supernatural creatures. There’s no room left for ambiguity or silence because a voiceover or a swelling Amit Trivedi cue has to rush in and explain the metaphor before the scene has even finished breathing. You watch characters deliver lines about oppression with the heavy delivery of a high school debate team performing Arthur Miller. It makes you yearn for the messy, unpolished pulp of older Hindi movies where directors didn't feel the need to justify every single bloodstain with a sociological thesis.
Visually, Siddhartha Diwan’s cinematography leans hard into royal blues and violent reds, painting every frame like an expensive calendar you might find in an upscale boutique hotel. The camera glides through hallways with an expensive smoothness that drains the suspense right out of the jump scares. When a character gets dragged into the canopy, you aren't terrified because the frame is so cleanly composed and beautifully color-graded that it looks like a perfume commercial gone wrong. Horror needs dirt and grease and bad lighting to get under your skin. Here, everything looks like it was scrubned twice with scented soap before the cameras even started rolling.
Avinash Tiwary tries his best as Satya, the younger brother returning from London with Western books and a head full of romantic ideas, but he is trapped inside a character who exists solely to be proven wrong. He wanders through the mansion looking concerned, holding a journal, trying to solve murders that the audience figured out during the opening credits. There's a supporting actor playing a local doctor who is so obviously dubbed by someone else in a recording booth that every time he opens his mouth the illusion crumbles completely. It’s strange how Bollywood movies keep tripping over basic post-production sync work even when the budgets are flush and the streaming platforms are footing the bill.
The folklore angle works better than the murder mystery, mostly because the film drops its pretense of being a whodunit and just leans into the visual pleasure of a woman taking her revenge from the treetops. When Bulbbul transforms, crawling upside down with her red sari trailing like a flag of war, the movie finally finds its pulse. It is not subtle and it certainly is not smart, but in those few wordless minutes, it stops trying to explain itself and just lets the monster run. That’s usually when cinema is at its best, anyway, right after the plot gets thrown out the window.