Forbidden Dreams of Sensual Plurality

Secret of a Mountain Serpent is an abstract, yet assertive work of indie cinema. Directed by Nidhi Saxena, the feature length film screened during the 44th Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF), on October 9th 2025, at the Cinematheque. This movie was part of the programme for Focus: Edges of Belonging–a series that highlighted contemporary voices and narratives from India. 

I reached out to VIFF’s guest programmer Deepika Suseelan via email, with a request to share more about her experience putting this programme together. “I watched over a hundred films including official submissions to the festival as well as titles I personally sourced for the programme,” she wrote back. “Prominent themes included internal migration, displacement, identity, womanhood, particularly negotiation of womanhood within patriarchal structures. Despite their diversity, all these narratives seemed to converge on this pivotal question of belonging–what it means, how it is denied or ultimately reclaimed with dignity.”

Secret of a Mountain Serpent taps into regional folklore, myths and biblical themes to examine the breadth and depths of female sensual desire. The movie’s plot transports audiences to the cusp of the second millennium CE, in a Hindi-speaking community that is tucked into a Pahadi town, nestled in the Lower Himalayas.

The protagonist, Barkha (Trimala Adhikari), is the wife of an Indian army soldier named Sudhir (Pushpendra Singh), who is yet to return home after the Kargil War. The movie invites the viewer to glimpse through Barkha’s thoughts, dreams and reality, offering ethereal vignettes of a desolate life. She grapples within the bounds of patriarchy, entangled in a cage of unrequited yearning. The women of the town perform various forms of labour. They seek reassurance and companionship in each other’s whispered presence. One day, Barkha crosses paths with a mysterious stranger, Manik Guho (Adil Husssain), who threads the gaps of her heart with erotic musings. His presence is poetic, ephemeral, and at times imposing. Their interactions harken fantastical forays into Barkha’s forbidden dreams of sensual plurality. 

The quest for belonging–both within oneself and among various agents of control–is rarely explored through a feminine gaze on film. Deepika Suseelan expands, “In a patriarchal society, women are often pushed to the margins and their voices are buried under silence, duty or myth, they are often denied to fully belong, their identities are shaped by the roles imposed upon them. In this film womanhood is not explained, but experienced.” The film’s ambience is moody, but the tale shimmers with soft radiance. Each frame is subversive, skirting the edge of the medium with its dreamlike pacing and disjointed narrative that brim with symbolic abstractions. 

For me, the film’s first scenes landed like a stone thrown into a silent pond. The melancholic color palette of blue, maroon, brown and grey, the looming tree trunks and dense mist that drape towering mountains like shrouds, juxtaposed against female banter unsettled my mind. They brought up confused judgments. I became irked, impatient for the story to unfold. Without familiar anchors like a cohesive plot, crisp visuals and a set of relatable characters to sink my teeth into, I felt thrown out of my comfort zone. Eventually, like Barkha, I accepted a bite of the crunchy, red apple, and took a tentative dip into a cove of repressed emotions.

“...the erotic offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to the woman who does not fear its revelation, nor succumb to the belief that sensation is enough. The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation. For this reason, we have often turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information, confusing it with its opposite, the pornographic.”

- Audre Lorde in the essay “The Uses of the Erotic”

Director Saxena’s approach to cinema sits squarely on the erotic plane. It champions a certain kind of expressive storytelling that has been trivialised, often denied in mainstream cinema. This historic exclusion influences the very rational and aesthetic sensibilities of the medium. Many of us feel entitled to homogenized cultural perspectives. Ultimately, such polished narratives tend to aid hegemonic worldviews steeped in capitalist realism, patriarchy and Enlightenment-era ideals. 

In Secret of a Mountain Serpent, the mountains, rivers and tree trunks breathe life onto the screen. Meanwhile, the human characters fade into surreal imprints–a combination of mythical tales, local gossip and forlorn memories. Their dialogues are stripped bare, but the calls of birds and the hisses of serpents echo with folk wisdom. Everyday objects like apples, slippers, and glass bangles tingle with life. Saxena’s experiments with sound and visual design are audacious. Each scene reimagines how bodies, man-made structures and natural features are portrayed on screen. The women in this movie are framed with intrigue, laying emphasis on sprawling silhouettes and enigmatic back profiles. In many scenes, there is more shadow, less light. This approach turns the hilly landscape into unexplored frontiers of embodied knowledge and erotic desire. The ambiguous storytelling invites deeper engagement, egging the viewer on, to mine further and further into the psychic terrains of the film. 

Folktales carry the beating heart of oral traditions and signal any given community’s implicit moral codes. These fables hold the risk of misinterpretation when consumed from a (geographical and cultural) distance. I asked Deepika Suseelan if she has any advice on how to avoid exoticising underrepresented narratives. “It is important to remember that even within a region, interpretations of these stories are diverse and layered. I believe the key to avoiding exoticism lies in contextualization, collaboration and by reshaping the very structures through which stories are created, shared and received,” she opined. 

I agree. While the references to apple trees and Eve in the biblical Garden of Eden feel obvious, there is scope to elaborate on aspects of cultural specificity that shape Barkha’s inner and outer worlds. She is a school teacher and is married to a soldier, both roles that tether her to upholding nationalistic interests. This framing is a deliberate subjectivity–she is someone with caste-based social privilege and access to (post)colonial institutions of knowledge and power. The transitory moments when she seeks to discover her private sense of self, whether by walking through the woods or in a cerebral restaurant located on the mountaintops, spark a departure from the established order. Like a serpent shedding skin, Barkha’s dreams endure despite her uncertain circumstances.

Hindu legends are lush with references to serpents (Nagas) and to snake-like spirits (Nagins), typically seen as anarchic agents of the netherworld. Mythical tales about sisters Kudra and Vinata, and those about serpents Vasuki, Takshaka and Kaliya allude to the region’s proto-history, where Nagas spread terror and chaos before Vedic deities subjugate the limbless reptiles. 

The bygone era might have brimmed with myriad spiritual influences–Vedic fire rituals of Aryan immigrants, Indigenous practices and beliefs of forest-dwellers (including a clan named Nagas) and also, Varnashrama dharma–a caste based order that preaches social segregation based on birth. These contradictory forces wrestled for dominance, ultimately assimilating into a common consciousness. Fragile bulwarks of social agreements between diverse philosophical schools continue to dictate the currents of patriarchy and political elitism, colluding through the ages, to enable massive nation-building endeavors. 

Secret of a Mountain Serpent circumvents the male-centric heroicism of oft-repeated myths and epics. instead handing agency to women, who bear the weight of preserving the land and embodied cultures long after the annihilatory violence of masculine dominion. The rich infusion of folklore reimagines serpents and birds as soulful messengers who help a woman discover her locus of belonging and connection. When husbands become embedded in the latest cycle of imperial aggression, the mountains, trees and river serpents ignite an impassioned subjectivity that symbolises a homecoming of sorts, bringing women to the laps of natural wisdom. 

War propaganda tends to focus on the sacrificial exploits of men. Saxena’s story, however, inverts patriarchal jingoism by embracing the forbidden allure of the mountain serpents.