Aamis Analysis

Aamis

Written & Directed by: Bhaskar Hazarika

Official Selection at Tribeca Film Festival.

Spoilers Ahead. I read the pitch synopsis of this film in the document of Goa Film Bazaar and I was blown away by the kind of stories that people were coming up with. When you read a story like, you are in such disbelief that it feels impossible to organically arrive at this stage but the way the film does it with so ease is impressive. I honesty was expecting more madness, I was expecting that she’d like the meat less cooked and more raw – I was expecting that he would also love her meat and that’s their way of getting physical as he says. I was expecting that they’d bite each other and eat each other’s flesh raw, the pace with which the film took us to a place where we believed that she is enjoying human meat, it could’ve easily gone there. But this film’s ending too was interesting, especially the look that cop would’ve had when he was looking at a guy trying to cut a human being, I would’ve been silent and numb but since he is a cop – his reaction was slightly different to it.

At the end, when we hear the breaking news headline – it made me feel that every bizarre crime incident we hear in one line in Inshorts or in TV headlines, would have had an organic story like this behind and we often feel like they are insane people – but there is rationale behind a lot of things and the way they pan out. This film is a subversion of the idea of an extra marital affair, it says that it can be way more things than sex. For us, their relationship might seem even worse than infidelity but for them, their relationship is sacred. The abstract imagery helps a lot in conveying how they feel, especially the scene where for the first time she eats human flesh, the montage is used so effectively – she is eating it and suddenly we see an image of she feeling liberated for half a second, or even less. That image of she feeling liberated, is also very well shot – it conveys her liberation in all respects. The scene where he dreams about her, we see a lot of images – we see her navel, we see blood and a lot of weird images juxtaposed to create an effect. Simple things like her glossy dark red lipstick also conveys a lot, it is a symbol for their hunger for more.

The sound design is used to make us squirm, whether in the scene where she tries bat meat, the scenes where he cuts his meat and in the last scene where he murders someone. The cinematography is visibly interesting, there is one scene where after they try to steal a body from the morgue – at that point both of them are at a point from where there is no looking back, they’ve stooped down to depths from where nobody can pick them up. The next shot is, where both of them are sitting in a restaurant and we see them from the terrace of the next building, conveying it visually – the shot is just for a few seconds, but it totally got into me because of the seamless cohesion of craft and story. After she asks him to get her a human’s meat, some from the arm and some from the leg – we see subjective framing at its best. We see shots of crowd and it makes us feel uncomfortable, it just reminds us that it could even be us. The camera then shows only the legs of people, the discomfort keeps growing – this is exactly similar to how some films show us only the private parts of women – like the opening scene of Kiara Advani in Vinaya Vidheya Rama. The only difference being, here the filmmaker’s intention is to make us squirm and there the filmmaker’s honest gaze does that for us.