The Village on Prime Video review: Milind Rau’s horror series is relentlessly grotesque

Director Milind Rau’s world-building in Tamil web series The Village is immersive, from the bioluminescent plants and creatures to the mutants who spring upon the hapless protagonists with frightening frequency. (Screen grab/YouTube/Prime Video India)

Amputated limbs, bodies sliced into two, rape, incest, cannibalism and faces with pus-filled boils. To put it mildly, Milind Rau’s The Village, based on a graphic novel of the same title and co-written with Deepthi Govindarajan and Deeraj Vaidy, is gory, grotesque and everything in between.

Kattiyal, a small, abandoned village near Thoothukudi, is at the heart of the horrific events that unfold through this six-episode series. On a stormy night, a pregnant woman and her family are rushing to the hospital in a mini bus. This is the surest sign that something terrible will happen – and it does. They’re forced to take the road to Kattiyal, and are waylaid by a group of mutants. Where did they come from and what do they want?

The non-linear plot jumps decades and places to piece together the answer. In Singapore and in present times, Prakash (Arjun Chidambaram), a wheelchair-bound drug addict and the scion of a scientist-businessman, is in desperate search of a miracle drug to cure him. He sends out a group of scientists with a defence squad (John Koken plays its surly captain) to obtain this drug that supposedly exists in Kattiyal. The composition of the team and their journey through Kattiyal may remind you of films like Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid (2004) – the promise of immortality in the shadow of grave danger. It’s no coincidence that the village is located near Thoothukudi, the site of massive protests against a copper smelter plant in 2018.

Meanwhile, Dr Gautam (Arya), his wife Neha (Divya Pillai), daughter Maya (Aazhiya) and dog Hectic are on a road trip from Chennai. Circumstances make them take a diversion and they end up in…where else but Kattiyal? Three other men – Sakthi (Aadukalam Naren), Karunagam (Muthukumar) and Peter (George Maryan) who have connections to Kattiyal – are drawn into their misfortune too.

Rau’s world-building is immersive, from the bioluminescent plants and creatures to the mutants who spring upon the hapless protagonists with frightening frequency. The jump scares in the first two episodes are effective because we don’t know what to expect. The series is still settling itself, establishing the premise and laying out plot threads that will intersect at some point. What we want after that, though, is plot progression. But Rau is relentless in throwing one gory-gorier-goriest scene after another – think 10X of Bala’s Naan Kadavul (2009) with no breather. The sound design reflects this, and the pinpricks of fear and suspense that we experience in the initial episodes devolve into loud mayhem. Small mercy that many of these scenes are shot in low light and have a muted colour palette.

The protagonists don’t develop a strategy. There’s no time to think because the mutants are coming at them from all directions. What this means is that a certain sense of fatigue envelops you after a point. There is no intelligence in either the predator’s hunt or the prey’s escape. The prosthetic makeup and VFX is sufficiently creepy (even if not consistently good) but the mutants also needed better character designs. Why do some of them die when shot, bludgeoned or hacked? And why do some of them seem impossible to kill? They appear to possess supernatural powers – but what exactly are those? In John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place (2018), for example, the predators are sightless aliens with impenetrable armour. They have extremely sharp hearing, so the protagonists have to be careful not to make any sound. Later in the film, they figure out that the aliens cannot tolerate high-pitched sounds, and that knowledge becomes their weapon.

In The Village, the protagonists run from one danger to another, screaming and burying bodies in between. The information-gathering doesn’t lead to a solid plan. They don’t respond, they react. All the time.

They don’t have back stories that make us want to root for them either – or they are introduced too late into the screenplay. Like the fact that one of them has lost a daughter. Or that there is a paedophile among the group. These stories are not allowed to become part of the characters and their primary motives, and so end up looking superficial.

The performances aren’t great, barring Kalairani’s act as the nasty, vengeful Subhadra. Arya struggles with emoting, and his sense of urgency to save his family remains at the surface. The friendship between Sakthi and Karunagam doesn’t move us either. This is also perhaps the fault of the writing – the defence squad, for instance, seems plucked straight out of a Hollywood film. They’re a mercenary group with a uniform, bad Tamil accents and funeral rituals, but the character sketches don’t go beyond this.

Same with the geeky scientists who do stupid things like touching something that clearly looks dangerous. So, when people drop dead one by one, it leaves you cold. Dr Gautam and family, too, never quite rise from the kind of families you see in coffee ads – where adults feel like romancing first thing in the morning though they’re living with a small child and a dog.

There is a lot of violence in The Village, and that includes graphic, stomach-churning scenes of sexual violence. The intention was probably to go full-throttle on the repulsive, but considering the dynamics of sexual violence in real life – where the shame is thrust upon the victim-survivors rather than the perpetrators – more thought needs to go into how these scenes are executed. The gaze should not unwittingly become voyeuristic.

To its credit, The Village leaves us with several startling visuals. It certainly feels new for a Tamil web series, and there is also the promise of a sequel. The scariest horror flicks are those that make you believe it could happen to you. For that to happen with The Village, Rau and team would do well to go back to the drawing board and flesh out the characters and plot threads some more.

The Village is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.