Nidhi Saxena’s sophomore film, Secret of a Mountain Serpent (2025), is a poetic exploration of a woman’s inner world shaped by longing and quiet unrest. Blending mythic echoes with an oneiric visual language, the film becomes a portrait of how separation, waiting, and hope shape the emotional lives of women in a remote hill town living under the shadow of war. It is a world where the uncanny brushes against the everyday, crafting a work that feels both grounded and otherworldly.
In the small Kumaon town of Almora during the late-1990s Kargil border conflict, most of the young men are away on duty, leaving the women to manage homes, families, and their own unspoken worries. The constant flow of news from the front only deepens their sense of uncertainty. Barkha (Trimala Adhikari), a schoolteacher whose husband, Sudhir (Pushpendra Singh) is posted far away, tries to maintain her routine, though she quietly struggles with loneliness. Her life begins to shift when Manik Guho (Adil Hussain), a visiting engineer and writer, arrives in the town. His gentle curiosity and outsider’s presence awaken emotions she has kept buried. As Barkha reconnects with her own desires, other women in the community also start confronting their hidden longings.
The film begins with apples swaying on their branches against a Himalayan backdrop, a hand darting up to grasp one. Soon after, by the riverbank, a woman collecting firewood is halted when a serpent winds itself around her leg. A later title card recounts an old tale in which a woman, seized mid-crossing by a snake, made a vow she never fulfilled. Ever since, the river has been treated as forbidden terrain for the women of the region. As the narrative unfolds, these early images of the apples, serpents, and the guarded river recur with increasing insistence, and resonate with broader symbolic lineages. At the same time, natural elements, animals, and everyday objects take on symbolic weight, creating a visual rhythm that echoes the stories whispered across generations.
Saxena shapes her film around fluid, intuitive associations rather than plot-driven logic. Instead of guiding the viewer through clear motivations or tidy resolutions, she drifts between inner states, letting Barkha’s emotional landscape bleed into the world around her. She constantly delves in emotional territories that emerge not through exposition but through the resonance of time, silence, and the body. The film often feels suspended, as if, caught at a threshold where lived reality and private imagination constantly overlap. This liminal quality allows us to explore how fear, longing, and inherited stories quietly shape the lives of the women in this mountain community. They become unspoken metaphors for the emotional labour expected of the women left behind, while the men stationed at the border engage in their own parallel routines of maintenance and survival. These motifs form a delicate interplay between the domestic interior and the militarised world looming beyond the hills.
What ultimately grounds the film is its profound attention to interiority, sustained in no small part by cinematography that is pristine, almost crystalline, yet never distracts from the emotional core. Every composition by Vikas Urs carries the weight of solitude that is neither decorative nor distant, but shaped with a clarity that makes its edges palpable. Working in perfect harmony with this visual refinement, Niraj Gera’s sound design amplifies the film’s emotional undercurrents without drawing attention to itself. Beneath the town’s calm surface lies a carefully sculpted sonic landscape: rumblings from afar, winds sweeping through narrow valleys, and the subtle strains of a region bearing its own burdens. Soft utterances, slivers of poetry, and tunes of longing drift in and out of the narrative like private thoughts momentarily slipping into audibility. These auditory textures merge seamlessly with the imagery, ensuring that the film resonates as powerfully in what is heard as in what is seen. The soft murmur of Rekha Bhardwaj’s voice, followed later by Swanand Kirkire, becomes a guiding thread as an aural pulse that mirrors the film’s emotional cadence and anchors the story in a quiet, persistent ache. Adding to this intricate interplay, Salman Alvitigala’s editing lends a quiet grace to the film’s unhurried rhythm. His cuts never rush the moment. Instead, they allow the story to breathe, shaping a tone that feels organic and contemplative. Trimala Adhikari, Adil Hussain, and Pushpendra Singh inhabit their roles with a measured intensity, allowing emotion to surface through the subtlest shifts in expression and gesture. Their restrained performances evoke a rich interior life, making absence, longing, and unspoken desire palpably felt without ever tipping into overt dramatics.
Through its patient construction, Secret of a Mountain Serpent shapes a layered experiential universe, evocative in mood and detail, and offers a richly imagined exploration of desire and displacement. It feels like an ode to the unseen spaces within women’s lives and the intangible forces that shape their dreams. After premiering at this year’s Venice International Film Festival, the film went on to win the ‘New Voice Award’ at the Bangkok International Film Festival.
