Director: Romi Banerjee
Writer: Romi Banerjee
Cast: Chaiti Ghoshal, Kalpan Mitra, Ankita Roy, Brishti Roy
Running time: 21mins
60 years ago, a sci-fi chiller about women replacing all livestock with chemically lobotomised men might have made for a decent pitch in the Twilight Zone writer’s room. It would be some kind of world-turned-upside-down thought experiment, delivering disorientating chills on one level, but asking even less comfortable questions of its audience about the society they currently live in – where the shoe is firmly on the other foot.
In the modern conspiratorial age, however – where the whingeing purveyors of dominant ideology are doing constant mental gymnastics to portray themselves as persecuted victims – Ghee swiftly outstays its welcome. Set in an unspecified, wealthy enclave, somewhere in India, Geet (Kalpan Mitra) is visiting Sanju, his aunt (Chaiti Ghoshal) and cousin. From the very beginning, however, the synth-heavy soundtrack and pointedly odd energy between the two actors lets us know this is no heartwarming family reunion.
The greetings are abrasively – almost incestuously – friendly. As she welcomes him into her mansion, Sanju is a little too pleased to see her nephew, in a way which is conspicuous to us, but perhaps seems normal to him. The conversation quickly shifts into middle-class pleasantries which cloud his mind either way – discussions about the vintage of the wine Geet brought; and the punctuality of Sanju’s daughter Vrishti (Ankita Roy) who is jetlagged after another international trip.
When the three of them sit down to lunch, the weird vibes persist. The mind of Mona (Brishti Roy) the maid seems to be conspicuously elsewhere, and her shaky service leads Sanju to make multiple, angry apologies. Rather than picking up on any of this, though, this merely elicits knowing looks from Geet, as if to say you just can’t get the staff these days.
While class might have insulated him from those initial cues, however, it provides him with a red flag in another. Meat being the staple of upper-class cuisine that it is, Geet picks up on the strange atmosphere when the food arrives. Vegetable sandwiches? Sanju is not joining him in the chicken biryani she has prepared – her own special recipe – something which she plays off as due to a recent health warning. Vrishti meanwhile joins her mother in the lighter lunch option, citing her desire to stay slim. Of course.
His concerns assuaged; Geet greedily gobbles up the entire biryani – even as conversation throws up more red flags. As Banerjee’s script finally wades deep into the exposition, we piece together what is going on – some of it obvious, some of it bizarre.
First, the obvious: Geet probably shouldn’t have been eating the food nobody else would touch in the house everyone was being weirdly affectionate to him in. If you would like to avoid spoilers, you should probably leave it there.
Then, the bizarre unfolds: his aunt is a scientist, and she has been working on an experimental compound – which as well as being delicious, comes with a number of mind-altering side-effects.
The big reveal is still to come, however. Making it clear why she was behaving so strangely, the maid returns, walking two more men on a leash. As she flogs them gleefully, they obediently impersonate domestic animals. Sanju has been testing her compound exclusively on men, and having ignored all the warning signs, because Geet presumably just assumed women (especially ones related to him) would only have deference towards him, now finds himself at the heart of some kind of dystopian feminist conspiracy.
Shot entirely in black and white, Ghee seems to be leaning hard into the Twilight Zone homage I alluded to earlier. In many ways it pulls it off. Its central performances are well realised – not naturalistic, but not pantomime either: a heightened version of the human experience, suitable for an allegorical story. At the same time, the pacing – including the slow reveal of Sanju’s strange plan – is impeccable, and manages to gradually raise the tension without feeling rushed.
But as I mentioned earlier, Ghee has been released into a very different world from the Twilight Zone. The story does not do enough to explore the motivations of Sanju – and as such leaves itself open to the most absurd of readings: that women have no legitimate grudges at the way men treat them, and that their ‘liberation’ is simply a bad-faith argument to justify enslaving men.
In the age of the sympathetic villain, Ghee badly needs to examine the whys of Sanju’s plan – perhaps even more than the protracted McGuffin which serves as the how. Women all around the world are finding their rights being eroded in perpetuity, even their bodily autonomy is ‘up for discussion’ across North America and Europe. In India, protests are regularly held at the way the nation’s legal infrastructure makes it difficult to prosecute rapists – including judges who have told women they “invited trouble” on themselves.
No such topic is ever even hinted at by Banerjee’s script, however, and that is the film’s greatest failing. By including real-world reasons to motivate the plot, Sanju’s plan might have had more of a grounded impact in terms of Ghee delivering as a sci-fi chiller. But it could also have given the audience food for thought about how they behave in their everyday lives. Are their actions perpetuating a system of violence, which will beget further violence – and sooner or later, will directly impact them?
Without exploring any of this, in this cultural moment, means Ghee could come across as taking the deranged whining of the manosphere as gospel.
Banerjee’s cautionary tale is vague on what exactly it is cautioning against. If it is cautioning people that keeping anyone in a forced position of inferiority will eventually lead to violent repercussions, it needs to be more daring with the way it addresses the social relationships it is clearly looking to engage with. If it is cautioning men that women looking for equality are a danger to all men, that is reprehensible.