From writer/director Sidharth Srinivasan of Reel Illusion Films (Soul of Sand)– KRIYA is a genre-driven arthouse film, which sets out to subvert Hindu ritual tradition, exposing its debasement of women. It is the nightmare odyssey of a young DJ named Neel (Nobel Luke) who is picked up one fateful night by the beautiful, free-spirited Sitara (Navjot Randhawa), only to be thrust into a hallucinatory world of magic and transgression surrounding the imminent death of her father.
In India, patriarchal custom dictates that a male offspring perform a parent’s last rites. However, in the absence of any male relative, Sitara desperately seduces Neel to step in and do the needful, when her father eventually passes away during the course of the night. Neel’s initial reluctance to officiate the ritual relents, giving way to an urgent desire to save Sitara and her kid sister Sara from the ancestral curse that afflicts their family. But there seem to be darker forces at work, conspiring to implicate Neel in the ultimate downfall of Sitara’s clan…
New Delhi filmmaker Sidharth Srinivasan’s first horror work (and first narrative feature in a decade, following SOUL OF SAND, an acclaimed selection at TIFF and Rotterdam), KRIYA comes at the viewer with seductive allure and a uniquely venomous bite. It’s an aesthetically beautiful film, mystically atmospheric and imbued with a creeping unease that casts an uncommon spell.
“As an independent filmmaker who directs from his own original material, I have always felt more comfortable being an outlier. My rather irrational desire for originality, to make films that are atypical and uncategorizable, inevitably steers me towards genre. For it is the fantastique that enables one to fearlessly open closed doors and peer behind forbidden facades, thereby revealing one’s deepest fears and anxieties” says Srinivasan on filmmaking and inspirations for KRIYA. Watch the trailer now below!
Director: Sidharth Srinivasan
Story & Screenplay: Sidharth Srinivasan
Producers: Sidharth Srinivasan, B. S. Narayanaswamy (COURT, WART, SIDDHESHWARI,
FIRAAQ etc.), Tejash Shah (HEADHUNTER etc.)
