Bhooty Call - Tumbbad

Tumbbad (2018) begins by explaining the story's cosmology.  When the world was new, the Goddess of Plenty (who possessed infinite gold and infinite food) gave birth to sixteen million gods, but her favorite child was her firstborn, Hastar.  Hastar was greedy, and claimed all the gold for himself, but when he tried to take the food as well, the sixteen million other gods fought back.  They would have destroyed him, but the Goddess hid him away in her womb, on the condition that his name doesn't appear in any of the ancient histories and no one worships him, ever.  It's a very evocative myth, and it is wrong in one important detail.

Of course, you can't keep a god secret forever, and in the cursed village of Tumbbad, Hastar has attracted a cult of worshippers,  Not much of a cult, really.  There's a bedridden Sarkaar (madhave hari Joshi), his long-suffering servant/mistress (Jyothi Malshe), their two sons Vinayak (Dhundiraj Prabhakar Jogalekar) and Sadashiv (Rudra Soni), and the Sarkaar's great grandmother (Piyush Kaushik), who has become a withered, eternally hungry monster that they keep chained up, well fed, and asleep.  (She is basically Gollum, only slightly more monstrous.) 

And everything is . . . well, not fine.  Pretty damned bleak, in fact.  The Sarkaar has wasted his life looking for the family's fabled treasure, with only a single gold coin to show for it.  he uses the coin to string Vinayak's mother along, because somebody has to keep Granny from waking up and eating everybody. And then the Sarkaar dies, and things go from bleak to actively terrible.  Sadashiv falls from the mansion wall, and his mother rushes him to a doctor, leaving Vinayak to feed Granny.  But Granny wakes up.  Vinayak barely survives, but Sadashiv doesn't.  His mother takes him away to Pune, and makes him swear never to return to Tumbbad.

Years later, Vinayak (now played by Sohum Shah) returns to Tumbbad.  Granny has been reduced to a withered husk, with a tree growing out of her body, and she is still alive and lucid enough to reveal the secret of the family treasure.  He returns to Pune with a handful of gold coins, and then another, and then another, enabling him to build a new life with his wife (Anita Date), but also making his pawnbroker (Deepak Damle) suspicious.

Despite the cursed mansion and the horrible undead grandmother, this is not a ghost story.  It's cosmic horror - the forgotten god is even named Hastar!  It presents a bleak, uncaring universe in which humans are destroyed by a combination of forbidden knowledge and their own avarice, like a combination of "The King in Yellow" and Erich von Stroheim's "Greed."  It's also top of the line cosmic horror: well written, wonderfully acted, with beautiful cinematography.  And it is so, so bleak.