Writer-director Nidhi Saxena’s second film, Secret of a Mountain Serpent, is an exquisite piece of cinema that blurs the line between the dreamily meditative and the tangible to explore the boundaries of female desire. Saibal Chatterjee reviews the film.

Secret of a Mountain Serpent by writer-director Nidhi Saxena is a poetic exploration of female desire set against the backdrop of the Kargil conflict. Premiering at the Venice Film Festival, the film weaves folklore, symbolism, and haunting performances by Trimala Adhikari and Adil Hussain into a tapestry of longing, liberation, and cinematic beauty. With its blend of myth and reality, evocative sound design, and visual mastery, it is an unforgettable contribution to Indian independent cinema.
Between Dream and Reality

Writer-director Nidhi Saxena’s second film, Secret of a Mountain Serpent, is an exquisite piece of cinema. It blurs the line between the dreamily meditative and the wholly tangible to explore the boundaries of female desire when it is set free from the suffocating constraints of societal stipulations. ‘

Secret of a Mountain Serpent, which premiered at the 82nd Venice Film Festival as part of Biennale College Cinema, is a delicate yet assertive cinematic epigram crafted with care and precision to portray a woman’s journey from solitude to fulfilment via a consciousness-altering awakening – a voyage as much of the mind and spirit as of the body.
War, Solitude and Longing

Amid the Kargil military conflict, young men have deserted an Uttarakhand hill town. They are away fighting on the nation’s border. The women, left alone in the company of old people and children, await the return of their men. News brings alarming tidings of rising war casualties. Inevitably, an air of melancholy hangs over the environs.

Schoolteacher Barkha (Trimala Adhikari) pines for her absent soldier-husband, Sudhir (Pushpendra Singh). But all of a sudden, her desultory world opens out when an enigmatic engineer-writer, Manik Guho (Adil Hussain) arrives in town.
Love and longing burst forth from beyond the realms of dreams and suppressed urges not only for Barkha but also, eventually, for the town’s other lonely women.

Early in the film, Barkha sits before a fire – a metaphor for what is raging within her – as a song bemoaning her missing beloved emanates from the soundtrack. The tone, muted and meditative, is unmistakably set but nothing that unfolds in the rest of Secret of a Mountain Serpent is either predictable or readily reducible.

Desire, Folklore and Liberation
Saxena, whose equally luminous first film, Sad Letters of an Imaginary Woman, played the Busan International Film Festival last year, does not strive for the convenient clarity and causality of conventional storytelling. She instead grants her protagonist a free run of a dreamscape that exists between the everyday and the ethereal. She tells a tender, haunting tale of isolated women lulled into believing and fearing a folklore about a forbidden river and a dreaded serpent that has been waiting for hundreds of years for a promised bride.
The dread of the unknown is whittled away by the poetry and presence of the enigmatic visitor from afar. Ab yahaan hoon toh yahin ka hoon (now that I am here, I belong here), Manik says to Barkha in a café where she waits for her husband to join her.
Sudhir has returned on a brief sabbatical with the gift of a pair of juttis and a bunch of plastic apples as a showpiece for the living room. Real juicy apples fresh from the orchards are what the woman craves. We see Barkha bite into an apple in more than one sequence.
A generational divide is underscored by Barkha’s ageing mother-in-law. The old lady has lost her teeth and can no longer eat apples. Enticement and empowerment intertwine as Manik seeps into Barkha’s dreams. Jealousy rears its head. But with Barkha well and truly in the grip of the serpent she has been conditioned to keep at bay, her life is about to change for good.

Symbols, Sound and Cinematic Precision
The symbolism of the apples and serpents, whose sightings become increasingly common for the women of the town, is rooted in local legend. But they can also be seen as Biblical motifs.
But in the world that we encounter in the film, the river, a force of seduction, is sought to be kept out of bounds. However, neither the lure of an apple nor the myth of the serpent is a representation of temptation or transgression. This isn’t about Eve’s loss of innocence. It’s about a woman finding herself.
The apples and the snakes in Secret of a Mountain Serpent denote the shaking off of shackles. They are a composite metaphor for long-dormant yearnings.
The writing enhances the experience of watching a woman unfettering herself as she digs into the quietude of her soul and hears her inner voice. Trimala Adhikari tempers the tempest of Barkha’s heart with the requisite sense of tranquillity. She obviously could not have had a better foil than Adil Hussain, who fleshes out a charismatic, mystifying man in a manner that is beyond masterful.
The conversations that Barkha has with Manik (as well as with others) are cryptic and punctuated by long pauses between pithy sentences, sometimes of no more than two to three words each.
The verbal exchanges may appear on the face of it to be drained of enthusiasm but the austere narrative draws all its power from these spare verbal exchanges, as timorous as the protagonist’s psyche.
In the early portions of the film, faces and figures stay out of the focal range of the camera or are revealed in fleeting shadows and silhouettes. And then, as more light is shed on their plight, Barkha and the other women begin to loom into sharper view. They acquire fullness of presence in a sunlight-bathed landscape that had hitherto been in the embrace of the stillness of the night.
The soundscape (sound designer: Neeraj Gera) complements the film’s evocative images and subdued colour palette (cinematographer: Vikas Urs) to perfection. Hissing, breathing, crackling of fire, whistling of the wind, chirping of birds and other sonic manifestations of nature are all captured to enhance the surreal blend of memory and myth, of serenity and tumult that Secret of a Mountain Serpent contains within itself.