Movie Review – Moshari (2022)

A 22-minutes horror fiction, Moshari, a laudable creation of the Bangladeshi director Nuhash Humayun, has several layers within it. It has been internationally acknowledged and has won awards at the Melbourne International Film Festival (2022), Atlanta Film Festival (2022), Woodstock Film Festival and many others. It is also the first Oscar qualifying film from Bangladesh.

Moshari is a Bengali term for a mosquito net. Perched on beds usually to ward off insects, moshari often creates a sense of safety in the minds of children by acting as a shield against the demons under the bed. Director Nuhash Humayun has appropriated the term deftly to proffer a befitting title for his movie which talks of a dystopian Bangladesh battling an endemic with its chief weapon of moshari, an enclosure which people crawl into at nights, to save themselves from the blood-sucking creatures prowling in the dark. However, this protective space can sometimes also be suffocating. The movie has multiple narratives, sometimes addressing climate change and environmental degradation or sometimes acting as a mouthpiece for the postcolonial world. However, this article attempts to analyze the movie from another crucial vantage point.

A tale of two sisters, this short film presents an analogy between the condition of women during a fictional apocalypse in Bangladesh and the reality of women in its repressive, patriarchal society. The movie begins with an eerie scene of mosquitoes and flies buzzing around a dead cow’s head and a little girl offering her prayers for the animal’s departed soul. However, the irony is that no religion or faith could save the blood of the women from the strange creatures lurking in the dark. A public announcement alerts the people to return to

their homes before sundown and coop up inside their mosharies until daybreak in order to save themselves from the vampires. The voice making the announcement being masculine and the on-screen female protagonists submitting themselves to the command, causes the audience to reflect upon the reality of a patriarchal society. The crude fact of how the agency of women is denied and how women are expected to stay like captives in their own homes just to avoid falling prey to the men sick with the plague of misogyny who do not even spare the children, has been carefully chronicled by Humayun. Humayun believes in visual storytelling and thus uses very few dialogues in his movie. However, these scattered dialogues are esoteric, trying their best to depict the suppressed fears of women in everyday lives. When the elder sister rebukes her sibling Ayra for playing with the cow’s horn despite

knowing how much she (elder sister) fears sharp edges and as she throws it away from inside the moshari, it rings a bell. It shows how every night the bodies of the women are violated against their wishes even within the safety of their homes. Further, she goes on to warn how the blood sucking predators would choose to hound Ayra first since they were just like old men, desirous of young virgins.

There is a constant palpable tension between the two sisters with the elder one being imperious and younger Ayra being rebellious, trying to break away from the restrictions imposed upon her, both by her sister and the society. During her encounter with the vampire,

Ayra frantically claims it was her space and that no one could invade it. However, the

vampire’s encroachment upon her personal space shows how the bodily autonomy of women is often transgressed in a patriarchal society. Throughout the movie, the elder sister has been addressed as ‘Apu’ which is a nickname for older sisters. But the audience is ignorant of

Apu’s personal identity and this is exactly what happens in our society. The identity of a woman is dependent on that of her family members and she is often deprived of her individual identity all her life. When Ayra is locked inside the cupboard and complains that she cannot breathe, Apu still keeps insisting her to stay inside until dawn. Hereby, Humayun showcases the sad reality of how women are socially trained to follow the norms and submit themselves to the will of the men despite their sufferings. While Apu sacrifices her life to save her sister, the last scene of the movie shows how Ayra has learnt to survive on her own amidst the predators. It demonstrates how despite innumerable women laying down their lives combating the predators, the reality remains unchanged each new day. The blood-thirsty beasts lurk around us, sometimes as strangers or even as our kins. Ayra addressing her sister as Goru or cow both at the beginning and at the end has a deep metaphorical significance too. It is only at the climax that the audience realizes that the dead cow had symbolized how Apu as a woman shall eventually perish despite yielding to the social norms.

Moshari is also brilliant technically with all the departments working in perfect synergy to ensure that the director’s vision is translated flawlessly. The movie’s BGM score and the shadow play successfully build up the tension and anxiety associated with any horror flick. The movie is an oddly intimate experience for its female audience. One feels as if they are shoulder to shoulder with the two characters on screen. Seeing a child confronting the predator makes the horror in the movie all the more omnipresent. Sunerah Binte Kamal aka Apu and Nairah Onora Saif aka Ayra have done justice to the women entrapped in a patriarchal society, fighting their everyday battles. It is therefore not just a tale of horror but

also of survival. It is perhaps through the sheer recounting of their everyday battles in the movie, that the actors seek to give the women in the audience some control over them.

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Preeti Saha

Intern, Asia in Global Affairs

Web References

• https://www.dailyo.in/entertainment/moshari-review-bangladeshs-first-oscar- qualifying-short-creates-dystopian-horror-out-of-mosquito-nets-38146

Last Accessed on – 22.01.2023 at 10:30 hours

• https://asianmoviepulse.com/2022/07/fantasia-short-film-review-moshari-2022-by- nuhash-humayun/

Last Accessed on – 22.01.2023 at 10:40 hours

• https://www.thedailystar.net/entertainment/tv-film/news/moshari-chilling-narrative- the-reality-women-3144291

Last Accessed on – 22.01.2023 at 10:30 hours

• https://www.thequint.com/climate-change/moshari-oscar-film-director-nuhash- humayun-interview-climate-change#read-more

Last Accessed on – 22.01.2023 at 09:30 hours