The secret sauce behind success of Sinners and Parasite (and why Bollywood's too scared to try)
Think of yourself as a rich producer hearing a pitch for a film titled Rakshash Bhoomi. It is set in the 1990s rural Maharashtra, where Dalit twins, Bhima and Arjuna, ex-Mumbai gangsters, return home. They build Ambedkar Chetna Kendra – a cultural hub bursting with Ambedkarite activism during the day, and by night, turns into a musical hub with raw Bhim Rap spun by their cousin Ravidas. Their defiant music wakes a vampirish Rakshash who turns anyone he bites into his thralls. One harrowing night, the community battles both supernatural terror and human hatred. Bhima and Arjuna fight both types of demons and sacrifice themselves so Ravidas can survive, to tell the story of resistance.
Would you give money to make this film? If you answer no, congratulations, you're fit to be a Bollywood producer. Because if this story were indeed pitched to a Bolly suit, he'd have politely muttered: 'too intellectual,' or worse: 'Make it cheap, it's got that OTT vibe,' without realising Rakshasha Bhoomi is nothing but my Dalit-history inspired rejigging of Ryan Coogler's global blockbuster Sinners where I've swapped Jim Crow American South for Maharashtra's caste battlegrounds, replacing vampires with Rakshashs feeding on prejudice.
They'd have missed the point of one of the most delicious templates in cinema history, one that has not only made billions ($360 million plus for Sinners) but has also given films that have stood the test of time. This template of weaving intense truth into spectacle, layering social critique with visceral horror, thrill or action, began with a film that continues to inspire: Akira Kurosawa's High and Low.
My first viewing of this 1963 masterpiece in 2007 left me speechless. A businessman agonises about paying ransom to a kidnapper who's mistakenly kidnapped his chauffeur's son, instead of his own. The kidnapper is caught after an edge-of-the-seat chase. Case closed, film over. Right? Nope! Not for Kurosawa, because here, as with his other films, he was merely using the mask of a thriller to hold up a synecdoche to the times, a lone crisis exposing the festering rot of post-war Japanese society.
Though called High and Low in English, its original name, Tengoku to Jigoku, translates to Heaven and Hell. The businessman's hilltop mansion is heaven, while the sweltering, desperate slums below is hell. Though Kurosawa's genius blocking of actors (you don't even realise that the first half is in one house) and one colour scene in an entirely black and white film is talked about a lot, its real genius was its refusal to see life and people in black and white. The kidnapper wasn't a cartoonish villain whose vanquishing would quell your lust for justice. Nope! He was the product of that disparity, a living, breathing human affected by the hell he was living in. And the hero, my favourite actor Toshiro Mifune, has equally questionable morals but ultimately does the right thing, including going to the kidnapper to try and figure out 'why'.
The film mirrored life's messy greys, a shock for someone like me who had grown up watching Bollywood's moral absolutes. Life is complicated. And cinema can also be complicated, like High and Low and the other Kurosawa gut-punch about the subjective nature of truth – Rashomon.
Despite this, that film was such a good thriller that to date, it is referenced as one of the best police procedurals ever, having inspired and continued to inspire a whole host of cop films and series. Yet, while those inspirations only took the actual template of the film in a piecemeal way, those who did understand the full essence of what Kurosawa was trying to do with the film have given birth to their own modern masterpieces.
One of the greatest proponents of that template is the modern master Boon Joon-ho. First with the Chris Evans starrer Snowpiercer, and most beautifully with Parasite, Joon-ho literally climbs Kurosawa's hill. Like Kurosawa takes two men – one on a hill, the other below it, Joon-ho takes two contrasting families – the wealthy Park family's sleek, sun-drenched home is contrasted with the Kims' damp, basement home, becoming a live wire of class warfare and buzzes with the same high voltage of High and Low.
Ryan Coogler's Sinners scores an ace on this template, dividing itself, like Kurosawa's film, into two halves. The first immerses us in the oppressive reality of the 1930s Jim Crow South, the societal hell festering with racism and trauma. The second half is the vampire attack. Like Kurosawa, Coogler humanises his monsters; his vampires aren't mindless zombies but thinking, feeling, almost tragic parasites inheriting the memories and even artistry of the bodies they inhabit. What they refuse to inherit is the racism, the societal violence inside them. Nah! They prefer the biting kind of violence, one that turns humans into their kind, not the hack, shoot and burn of racists. Indeed, it is these monsters who warn the humans of an imminent attack, proving that, in a way, they are better than those heartless, racist monsters.
This is the theme I have been struggling to use in crafting a film, where you shame humans by showing that monsters can be better than despicable humans. I found this in a Bhupen Hazarika song, 'Manuhe Manuhor Baabe' (Humans for humans' sake), whose most poignant line translates to: 'If humans do not become humane, monsters will never become so; And if demons do become humane, who should be ashamed then, brother.' Coogler manages that; the vampires in his films have more decency, more humanity than many 'humans' who judge people simply on the colour of their skin.
This brings me to Bollywood's blindspot. People are stories. And India, with the world's largest population, naturally, has the most stories. And our epics? Oh, they are coloured in delicious shades of grey – Mahabharata is full of characters with dubious morals, and so is Ramayana – at least the versions before Ramcharitmanas. And living in this hellscape of a nation, that is both beautiful and grotesque at the same time, where the cost of life is so cheap that an easily fillable pothole in Asia's richest municipality and one of the world's richest cities, Mumbai, can kill me, how is it that we can't create our own High and Low, Sinners, or Parasite?
Partly because Bollywood is stuck in escapism, but also because we often treat social realism and genre (horror, action, thriller, etc.) separately. We either get powerful social commentary in films like Do Bigha Zamin and Sairat or brainless fares like Dhamaal and the unending Housefull series. The idea that a brilliant critique of patriarchy, that is Stree, or an exposition of the horrors of greed, that is Tumbbad, can succeed, is seen as an exception, not a template. Coogler's Sinners or its bastardised version, Rakshash Bhoomi, would make producers squirm. Dalit/racism, plus horror, plus music – that's too niche, too intense, which can work only in OTT if made cheap according to them. They miss the point of a High and Low, Parasite and Sinners – spectacle mixed with substance as the recipe for blockbusters. Sinners ruled the box office because their layers resonated with people, not despite them.
And what about the aficionados, the artsy makers? I know a lot of them. They mean well, and we have great discussions. But they, too, are married to their corner of the binary. They want to craft 'world cinema' but equate it with boring, staid stories where the narrative is like a pond's stagnant water, rather than a river's flowing torrent. Like Bollywood, they too see the success of films with substance as an exception and hence do not even consider crafting the chase of a High and Low, the thrill of a Sinners, the wicked satire of a Parasite. I suspect it is partly because they equate slow-moving stories to resistance against commercial fare.
But a film doesn't have to be this or that. A film need not be an empty spectacle, or a sleepy, boring burn. The contrast of a High and Low could offer the antidote. This contrast frames societal divisions visually and structurally, like in Parasite and Sinners. Genre is a socially conscious filmmaker's Trojan horse – horror, thriller, action, sci-fi are the perfect vessels to smuggle in social critique (remember Get Out). And maybe splitting the halves like in High and Low and Sinners could work to have the distinct halves explore cause and effect, highs and lows.
The world isn't simple. Our stories shouldn't be either. Morals, like people, are never black and white. Our films shouldn't be either. We have got to make films that bleed truth, not just blood. Audiences are hungry for more than popcorn; they crave meaning. Give it to them paced in a beat they can dance to, and a bite that leaves a mark. Not on the body. But on the conscience, on the soul.
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