‘Mayasabha’ Movie Review: An Original But Less-Than-Affecting Psychological Drama

In Tumbbad director Rahi Anil Barve’s second film, stories are told in a cinema hall. Quite literally. A few characters reminisce, rage, narrate, perform and lie in a decrepit Mumbai movie theater named Mayasabha; they may be projecting, but the blank screen is witness to the telling and untelling of their stories. The place looks halfway abandoned between suffocating reality and misty mythology: like a penniless single-screen auditorium that gave up on its own allegorical significance (as Mahabharata’s Hall of Illusions). It is also “home” to a once-famous and now-unhinged film producer, Parmeshwar Kumar (Jaaved Jaaferi). He lives in the past but scoffs at history.

The mad old man spends his years lurking around in a gas-mask, fumigating the theatre relentlessly, destroying mosquitoes, cursing the actress-wife who left him for another man, and isolating his teenage son, Vasu (Mohammad Samad), in this smokey abyss. And most of all, he talks of a treasure he’s hidden away in this space; it’s the only thing he ‘saved’ from his marriage. When Vasu’s shady new friend Ravrana (Deepak Damle) visits with his sister Zeenat (Veena Jamkar), the siblings try to conceal their ulterior motive of stealing the gold. But it’s not easy: Parmeshwar (“God”) knows everything, even as they prey on the son’s naivety to unlock the father’s secrets. They thrash around in this graveyard of memories and fictions; a psychological chamber drama emerges.  

Mayasabha is obsessively built. Shot within more or less a single location, it has a moody stage-play vibe rather than a fantasy-fable one. The design and atmospherics — the foggy silhouettes, the rusty props (a neglected chandelier and a decayed Rolls Royce), the Shakespearean score, the ‘theatrical’ personalities and echoey ambience — don’t scream “low budget”; they’re baked into a plot where spatial language is the protagonist. Jaaved Jaaferi’s performance as the god of a self-curated universe has the tenor of Amitabh Bachchan and the edge of Shah Rukh Khan. Mainstream Hindi cinema has too often formalised his agility through comedy. Mayasabha mines his full range: there’s a musicality to his presence, almost as if Parmeshwar is performing like the actors he once knew to sell himself his story first. Jaaferi is hypnotic in parts, turning a potentially loud cliche into a one-man tragedy. He allows the film to have no flashbacks, a choice that lets the viewer imagine his life instead of blindly believing it; it also tests our perception of masculinity and ego. It’s like he’s avenging a past and defying a future by freezing his palatial ruins in time. He speaks of internet cafes, and gawks at smartphones. He imposes his paranoia and delusions onto a stunted Vasu like a parent using a nuclear bunker as an excuse to keep moulding his child.  

But Mayasabha is also a uniquely frustrating watch. As inventive as the film-making is, there’s a hollowness at its core. Like the characters on a quest for the proverbial gold, the viewer is left to search for something more — something that justifies the elaborate setting and chase. But the physicality is the film; it’s so dedicated to the fleshy surface that the seed all but disappears. The psychological warfare often descends into farce, particularly when Zeenat starts to chain-smoke and mess with Parmeshwar’s mind. The ‘action’ and scuffles that follow rely too heavily on Sagar Desai’s haunting score. It’s weird to hear real-world consequences like “the police will be here in the morning” in a cocoon. Which is to say: the film invites us to tease out deeper themes and metaphors and meaning, only to get lost in its own intrigue. I felt a similar distantness in Tumbbad — Mayasabha even reflects some of its narrative threads (the deceitful-storytelling father and his puppet-coded son; a ‘pot’ of gold in a womb-like place) — except one could sense the weight of original folk-horror in its bones. The emotions seemed as manufactured as the images, but the visual ambition offset the absence of a soul.  

Mayasabha doesn’t have that luxury of scale. What you don’t see is what you get. Does the concept of an embittered storyteller in a rundown theatre reflect the maker’s own struggles with the modern studio system? Is it a dark satire on the demise of the single-screen generation? Is it an overproduced take on toxic Indian dads and inherited trauma? Is it a parable on the stories we tell ourselves to invisiblise the skeletons in our closet? Is it commentary on the futility of faith (Parmeshwar and Vasu are pointed names) and the opportunism of devotion (the siblings befriend the ‘family’ with ulterior motives) in a world where money remains the only religion? Is there more to the Mahabharata-coded inclinations of the title? Is it a meditation on Mumbai and the ghosts of morality? Is it an indictment of myths and masculinity? You keep expecting some subtext to appear; you keep anticipating a method to the madness. But it’s a film that keeps promising to be smarter and denser than it is. In the end, we get so preoccupied with the hunt — for treasure, both literal and narrative — that the humanity of it all barely registers. We get so caught up with the cinema of it (h)all that the storytelling rarely registers. If all the world’s a stage, Mayasabha is too busy rehearsing its lines.