Popular reviews

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  Review by Shaswata Ray ★★★★ 1

  77/100

  Ahamaq is Mani Kaul's 4-hour TV adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky's 'The Idiot'. Aside from the many inevitable compromises that must be made while trying to fit into Doordarshan's 1-hour episode format, and the visibly low budget, Kaul's reinterpretation of Dostoevsky in an Indian context is remarkable, to say the least.

  True, the narrative is hampered by superfluous sound effects and what seems like cuts imposed by the network to compress such a sprawling narrative into a mere 223-minute runtime. The random exclusion of significant swathes of plot detail, completely omitting key characters like Totsky beyond name-dropping, can make for a confusing narrative (on top of the inherently puzzling nature of The Idiot itself, rife with paradoxical elements). Often we…

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  Review by sneh 2

  felt unintelligible and unsettling at times, but i don’t care. i’m blown away by the visuals in this. a masterful use of light, providing the tiniest sliver of a glimpse in one scene then casting dramatic shadows at just the right angles in the next. every object both animate and inanimate moves with ease, every shot seemingly framed with a purpose. i’m psyched something like this could ever exist

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  Review by H ★★★★★

  Almost hysterical- From its characters who change their hearts in every next scene to how it is presented with no sense of time and space. All things with no shape or form. I heard the same about the novel and kinda crazy how well this pulls it off.

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  Review by irmavep ★★★★½ 4

  This was 4 hours of me losing my mind every time Mani Kaul moved the camera

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  Review by tugging ★★★★★ 2

  The greatest Dostoevsky adaptation I have seen so far. Also, there is no doubt in my mind now that Kaul was the greatest independent filmmaker from India.

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  Review by pbo ★★★★★ 3

  took screenshots every 5 seconds because how. mani kaul may be the best ever

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  Review by Iskandaria Hassan 🪬 ★★★★★

  perhaps the most unsettling, ethereal inception of the recurring image of Shah Rukh Khan at a train station

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  Review by david c. porter ★★★★

  the control of the frame here is out of this world, genuinely jaw-dropping. legendary shit. kaul one of the hardest to ever do it

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  Review by Brandon Sylvester ★★★★★

  Dostoyevsky, paced as a three-hour raga.

  Myskin and Rozoghin both do a marvelous job at presenting the interior struggles of their characters. Kaul, less interested in trying to cram all the specifics of the novel (and, no doubt, hampered slightly by the TV format), creates his own set of visual signposts that, combined with the low-budget stage-y sets, envelopes the viewer in scenes of such simple grace and wisdom that you'll disregard the source text completely.

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  Review by shaheerjpeg ★★★½

  srk binge (1/50)

  messy, difficult to follow, awkwardly paced plus you can feel the difficulty in adapting such a novel but it's also masterfully shot, with lighting & staging being just otherworldly, thematically interesting & the charm of the FIRST EVER shah rukh khan "film" performance is unlike any other (how beautiful that his first scene has him doing the iconic laugh whilst being on a train aka the transport thats forever linked to srk). good start to this near year long, decade spanning binge of probably the best & most interesting leading man in cinema history!

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  Review by Carlos Cruz ★★★★★

  UDAYAN VAJPEYI: You were saying that the element of storytelling is predominant in Idiot.

  MANI KAUL: Yes! I did it that way... meaning the reason I like The Idiot is because, as Deleuze says (and he says it so well), film should not be considered a language. Film is not a language because it does not have a semantic order. Things do not have that kind of meaning in it. If you take a shot of a carpet, what does it mean? It is not a word. Then there is no need to unnecessarily refer to film as a language, the way people do in every seminar. Deleuze says that it would be better if we consider cinema on the…

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  Review by Saad Ahmad ★★★★

  My jaw dropped to the floor every single time the camera moved, each and every shot was so masterful, the way the camera pans and dollies to different characters in such tight spaces that too combined with how fucking insane the lighting and shadows work in literally every frame, I am really spellbound by how visually stunning the film was 
  Also god how I love Shahrukh Khan