Maa (2025) takes place in the same universe as 2024's Shaitaan, a movie which I have not seen. I don't think I need another cinematic universe in my life, but Maa is mostly standalone and features both Kajol and Kali, making it hard for me to resist.
The movie starts forty years ago in the village of Chandrapur, in West Bengal. the people of the village are performing a Kali Puja as the wife of the local landowner, gives birth to a son. And then a daughter, and in accordance with the village's tradition and a prophecy from Kali (as interpreted by the men of the village) the newborn girl is taken into the woods and sacrificed.
The newborn boy is not harmed in any way, and grows up to be Shubankar (Indraneil Sengupta), a family man living in Kolkata with his wife Ambika (Kajol) and twelve year old daughter Shweta (Kherin Sharma). Shubankar has broken with decades of horror movie tradition by telling his wife all about the curse on his family and the dark traditions of home, though they have not yet explained things to Shweta, who is curious about the ancestral village that her parents refuse to talk about.
Before any further exposition can be delivered, Shubankar receives a call from Joydev (Ronit Roy), informing him that his father has died. Subankar returns to Chandrapur for the first time in years, and makes arrangements to finally sell the family mansion, but on the way back home he's killed by a demonic tree.
A few weeks later Joydev calls Ambika, asking her to come to the village and finalize the sale of the mansion. Ambika agrees, but Shweta insists on coming along, and the locals are oddly hostile to the girl, though she does manage to befriend Deepika (Roopkatha Chakraborty), daughter of the mansion's caretakers. The real estate broker says that finding a buyer will be more difficult than expected, because of the curse, so Ambika and Shweta stay a little longer than anticipated.
Meanwhile, things go horribly wrong. Shweta convinces Deepika to take her to see the cursed tree in the nearby forest, and that night Deepika vanishes. Ambika asks the locals, with the help of stolid policeman Sarfaraz (Jitin Gulati), and learns that in the past few months all of the young girls who started menstruating have vanished, and then returned a few days later; Joydev blames a mysterious old woman who lives in the woods (Vibha Rani), but there's no evidence that the woman did anything wrong.
And then Deepika's grandfather, who had been catatonic before Shweta arrived, hands Ambika a scroll, revealing the actual circumstances of the curse, involving a demon created by a single drop of blood from the demon Raktibaija, when Kali and the other incarnations of the Goddess destroyed him. The new demon, Amsaja, seeks to use a mortal maiden of the landowner's family to reproduce, and they have been sacrificing their daughters for generations. The girls of the village have become Amsaja's minions, and they abduct Shweta.
Ambika wants her daughter back, but she's going to need help - divine help. She performs the Kali Puja with the women of the village, and then enters the forest with the blessing of Kali.
Maa has a plot that hearkens back to classic Bollywood horror - in a lot of ways this plays out like a Ramsay Brothers film with CGI special effects and (thankfully, given the subject matter) a lot less exploitation. It also works as parental horror; Ambika is the viewpoint character, and she's struggling with bringing up a preteen daughter in a world that is sometimes predatory, but her ordinary struggles are amplified by the supernatural elements.
But it's not just a horror movie, this is a sort of Gothic Devotional, mixing sincere religious elements with some tremendous spooky style. (I've seen my share of Hindu devotional movies over the years, and they usually don't have so many bats.)
In short, there's a lot going on here, and I'm not quite sure the plot actually holds together; everything runs on coincidence and a series of terrible decisions. On the other hand, Kajol is compelling, attacking the sometimes shaky script with her trademark sincerity. I'm not sold on the so-called "Devil's Universe," but Maa is a good reminder of just how talented she is.
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