Devastated

In confrontational conversations with his wife and his lover, a middle-aged Indian policeman opens up about his work as a 'sacrificial assistant', a state-designated agent tasked with extra-judicial killings of Muslim men. Elsewhere in the city, Lord Krishna and the prince Arjuna enact a dialogue from the Bhagavad Gita. Paralysed into inaction during battle by human considerations, Arjuna seeks the counsel of Krishna, who instructs him on the moral duty of a warrior. 

With Devastated, avant-garde filmmaker Ashish Avikunthak (Glossary of Non-Human Love, 2021) forges what may be his most provocative, pressing work yet, one that grapples with the primal contradictions of Indian civilisation and religiosity. Images of animal sacrifice and ritual self-mortification, repeatedly intercut with the policeman’s defence of his killings, raise questions about the hierarchy of violence and the nature of divinity, with no easy answers.

Despite its formal aggression and the apparent opacity of its ideas, Avikunthak’s tough, disturbing film may also be his most accessible undertaking to date, not least because it stares the beast straight in the eye. A work directly responding to the time and place it issues from, Devastated dares to probe the unsavoury recesses of India’s scarred collective psyche.

– Srikanth Srinivasan