Bangladeshi filmmaker Nuhash Humayun's horror anthology Pett Kata Shaw deservedly won Best International Feature at the 2023 Raindance Film Festival, and his sequel, Dui Shaw, has been selected for this year's edition of the festival. This unsettling work is set to screen on Sunday at London's Vue Piccadilly, which serves as the main venue for this year's Raindance. Like its predecessor, Dui Shaw is formed of four creepy stories, each of which puts a modern slant on traditional Bengali folktales. Also as with Pett Kata Shaw, Dui Shaw has played on Bangladeshi streaming platform Chorki, but the Raindance screening will provide a rare opportunity to see this handsomely mounted production in a cinema.
Dui Shaw begins with "Waqt", an episode in which a group of five young men are paid to desecrate a temple. Following the crime, a pattern emerges in which daily prayer time coincides with the violent death of one of the perpetrators, until the last man standing thinks he's figured out a way to cheat fate. Destiny also forms the basis of the second segment, "Bhaggo Bhalo", where a poor fortune teller is desperate to find the money to pay for his mother's kidney transplant. The third episode, "Antara", centres on the housewife of the title, who seems to lose her memory in the wake of a tragic accident. Finally, "Beshura" tells the story of a girl ostracised by her village on account of her lack of singing ability.
Of these episodes, "Waqt" is undoubtedly the pick of the bunch, although all are worth seeing; there are many small details here, including references to other episodes in both anthologies, that make Dui Shaw a good candidate for repeat viewing. Having set a high bar with Pett Kata Shaw, Humayun's second foray into this territory doesn't quite live up to what came before, but perhaps that's because what was a highly novel setup now feels a bit more familiar. That said, horror films from the subcontinent are still far from commonplace, and it's always refreshing to see such material evoked from a non-Western point of view. Its lack of reliance on jump scares also sets Dui Shaw apart from most current genre offerings.
As with Pett Kata Shaw, a strong streak of black humour is common to all of the stories told here, and Humayun never overplays his hand when it comes to gore, opting for fleeting glimpses of gruesome scenes when other directors might be tempted to linger over the carnage. Nuhash Humayun is a confident filmmaker who knows how to exercise restraint, and in a sense both Dui Shaw and its forerunner feel as if they have more in common with early 70s TV anthology series Dead of Night than they do with anything in contemporary screen entertainment. Far from being a superfluous imitation of the original, Dui Shaw is a clever slice of story-driven supernatural horror; another instalment would be no bad thing.
Darren Arnold
Images: Raindance
