Sean Parker
Over the last year and a half, I’ve referenced K/XI’s Black Lake about a dozen times. If you couldn’t already tell, I loved it. It was mind-blowing, foreboding, disturbing, visceral, and original. A real gut-punch horror film that mesmerized me as much as it shook me. The director showcased a singular voice that championed social justice through abstract horror that still profoundly resonates whenever I think about the film for more than thirty seconds. And I still often think about the movie at length. It’s the kind of experience that sits with and haunts you. When K/XI told me in an interview that she was looking to finish her shelved first film Maya next, I was excited about the feature but thought that there was no way she could top Black Lake. I’m happy to admit how incredibly wrong I was.
Jinn are not often discussed in western culture. America has its ghost stories, but anything we consider more evil than that gets lumped into a vague group of indiscernible demons. There have been few films that touch upon the subject of jinn, but our culture typically bastardizes the traditional concept. Jinn are not genies, not in the Arabian Nights idea anyway. Jinn are far more diverse and complicated than that, ranging between angelic and demonic depending on the story. Though jinn grant humans wishes in a few stories, encounters can be gifts but are more often than not curses. Jinn means “to hide” and has been interpreted as “beings concealed from the senses.” Pakistani folklore is full of run-ins with these supernatural entities, and Maya is based on real accounts.
Maya is about a young adopted girl (Madiha Hidayat) who begins exhibiting peculiar symptoms coinciding with her first menstruation. Unable to remember much from the time she spent with her biological family, she begins to fall increasingly sicker as she starts recovering memories and begins receiving phone calls from her biological mother asking her to return home. Her adopted sister, Kalika (Ramsha Shaikh), decides to accompany her back to the city of Karachi and hopefully put an end to whatever is ailing Maya. There they begin to rediscover the trauma wrought by the past and the horrors of jinn possession.
Opening with a child playing on a tricycle with camerawork granting obvious Shining references, Maya’s intro effectively sets the film’s tone. First, it turns a game of hide-and-seek menacing, then utilizes shadow play over a foreboding staircase, and finally shakes its playful ambiance for the disquieting fear of a child. In just over seven minutes, Maya hooks you. But it’s within the next half hour of the film the audience begins feeling the creeping dread of the possession Maya faces. Maya maintains a thick atmosphere of uneasiness throughout with an ominousness of unrelenting anxiety that I can only compare to The Exorcist.
What I genuinely love about K/XI’s work is her ability to take something non-threatening and somehow intensify it into a commanding and sinister concept. A scarf in Black Lake acts as the catalyst for the film’s fevered nightmare, but it’s an onslaught of everything in Maya. A rolling ball, the hum of a ceiling fan, a spiral staircase, a cell phone ring, a family dinner. My safety felt jeopardized after the first few minutes and security became a rarity over the ninety minutes that followed. Perhaps it was K/XI’s confession that the film features “authentic demonic sounds” that helped impress this level of danger into my psyche. Still, some credit undoubtedly belongs to Tatsujiro Oto’s amazing sound design and the film’s score as well. The music of Maya also helps put K/XI’s film in a category of flawless soundtracks as well, an accolade the director is now two-for-two on.
The occasional use of a filter over the film makes Maya look like a fuzzier, older film, much like the clouded memory of its young protagonist. The momentary jump-cuts added during the effect help visualize the concept of Maya’s fractured recollection and, whenever noticed, act almost as if a presence is haunting the film. The effect worked similarly in Antrum with pentagrams or frames from older films embedded, but the use in Maya is a lot less ostentatious and works subtly without kitschy gimmicks.
After the girls make it back to Maya’s hometown of Karachi, Maya begins to recover. This false sense of security works and the audience squirms torturously knowing this young girl is nowhere near out of the woods. The conclusion of the film is a bit quick in terms of the rest of the film’s pace, but it’s not one that’s easily forgotten, nor does it lessen the experience. Maya is a wickedly creepy and intense film from start to finish. There’s beautiful cinematography throughout the movie, and the young actress who plays the title character, Madiha Hidayat, is equally captivating.
Maya isn’t as abstract as Black Lake and provides a more linear narrative, but it still uses the supernatural as subtext for something else entirely. Jinn possession throughout the Islamic community has often been, and continues to be, a scapegoat for many not-so-supernatural issues. In the same way hysteria or witchcraft has labeled women throughout history, the “possessed” are often named unfairly or cruelly for any reason, drawing parallels to a modern-day Salem. In 2004, Latifa Hachmi lost her life undergoing month-long exorcism sessions because she was unable to bear children, while Naila Mumtaz was murdered in 2009 when family members attempted to exorcise a spirit after suspicions arose claiming Nalia’s unborn child may not have been her husband’s. Homosexuality has also been stated as a symptom of jinn possession.
What I’ve learned is that I should never doubt this one-of-a-kind director who knows how to craft a horror film. While finishing up Maya’s post-production, K/XI announced that she’s also in pre-production on her next movie, Vessel, which will end an informal trilogy with Maya and Black Lake. The director says, “Vessel is an LGBT supernatural drama and art film […] focusing on themes including art, women’s issues, LGBT representation, religion, and the supernatural, specifically on the present-day use of black magic in Eastern countries and South-Asia which is predominantly used to cause harm to women.” Being that I have thoroughly enjoyed every wringer that K/XI has put me through, I am bursting with anticipation. I also see no way she can top Maya, but I hope to be proven wrong again.
Maya will have its world premiere at the Renegade Film Festival (formerly the Women in Horror Film Festival) on March 4. It will tour in festivals worldwide following its premiere.
