‘Secret of a Mountain Serpent’ Movie Review: The Artistic War Between Desire and Belonging

Most film-makers use craft to tell stories. But some use stories to craft unfilmable feelings. Nidhi Saxena did it in her feature-length debut, Sad Letters of an Imaginary Woman, which had its world premiere at Busan last year. The life of a middle-aged caregiver and her ailing mother in a crumbling ancestral home became a medium to explore the transience of memories, trauma, loneliness and everything in between. The montage of a character recording whispers and past sounds from the walls of her house with a boom mic can seem strange — pretentious, even (the house in ‘arthouse’). But it encouraged us to renegotiate their relationship with the act of watching a movie. The orthodox need to interpret fiction made way for a sensory experience of understanding life itself. Imagine the screen speaking to the viewer in a different language: where expression comes disguised as an aesthetic.

Saxena continues to liberate stories from the burden of unfolding with Secret of a Mountain Serpent, a film that liberates an isolated community of women from the burden of folding. Her sophomore feature, playing at the 2025 Venice International Film Festival, is set in the Himalayan cantonment town of Almora during the 1999 Kargil War. The air of patriotism is thin at a high altitude; the faded blue walls and clothes look like colours that have been abandoned by those who humanised them. The men have left to defend the border; their wives and families are left behind to grapple with the uncertainty of silence and semi-grief. Their invisibility is seen through the days of Barkha (a wonderfully present Trimala Adhikari), a young schoolteacher who strives to long and belong at once; the duty to the memory of her husband (Pushpendra Singh) gets entangled with her desire for an enigmatic outsider (Adil Hussain). Little by little, her hope sheds its skin. A homegrown myth merges with the Garden of Eden narrative to reframe the morality of temptation and the originality of sin. Apples are eaten and serpents are deceived in a paradise-like environment, but a naked body becomes an emblem of self-love rather than shame.

This self-love extends to the film-making. The hilltown emerges as a landscape of shifting shadows, silhouettes, incomplete thoughts, mystical places and people who converse like they’re defying the stillness of the photographs that once contained them. People like Barkha are haunted to the extent where the very science of their existence is altered; when they walk, they hear snippets of unreciprocated letters and voices instead of the sounds of footsteps. When the men see birds in their bunker, the sound of flapping wings is replaced by the mingling of concerned whispers and intimate questions that can’t be contained by letters (“have you eaten?” – “do you miss me?”); it’s a lyrical literalisation of that vintage device of pigeons as long-distance messengers. At one point, Barkha is so conditioned by a culture of repression that she breaks the fourth wall and asks the director behind the camera about whether she loves the stranger and how she should feel. It’s one of the many go-for-broke moments in a film that looks like an abstraction culled from the consciousness of its characters and the nature they inhabit.

A still from 'Secret of a Mountain Serpent'

There are times when Secret of a Mountain Serpent alienates itself in pursuit of the intangible. Seeking poetry and surrealism in every frame is fine technical ambition — DOP Vikas Urs hits that sweet spot between exoticism and immersion — but it also beats the purpose of personality. If everything looks beautiful and mysterious, does anything look beautiful and mysterious? It’s like watching the most poignant part of an identity poem like Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light — the scene where an immigrant’s longing for her husband straddles the line between delusion and divinity — expanded into a whole film. The escapism doesn’t end for the reality to begin. It can be an exacting watch, especially when these worlds of fantasy, truth and interiority keep colliding into each other. Moments can feel longer than the context they’re trying to evoke: an unwitting echo of the film’s take on time, waiting and the reclamation of agency.

But Saxena ultimately does well to root the film’s urge to be seen in its humans’ struggle to see themselves. It may not conventionally add up, but there’s something to be said about a movie that dares to be its own entity. It’s almost as if Secret of a Mountain Serpent is stitched together from the pretty transitions and pauses that exist between the lines and shots of the more ‘normal’ coming-of-age stories. It makes sense by resisting the duty to make sense; it is desirable by breaking the rules of picturing desire. After all, courage at its most artful is nothing but recycled rage.